Simon Bainbridge obituary

The composer Simon Bainbridge, who has died aged 68 after a long period of ill health, responded deeply to the visual arts and poetry in a way that informed a musical style of impressive technical assurance and originality. Time spent studying with Gunther Schuller at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts (1973-74), opened his ears to jazz and what Schuller termed third stream music, a fusion of jazz and classical.

But despite the absorption of jazz influences such as big band and Miles Davis into his style, his compositions remained intellectually challenging, often austere. A flirtation with the minimalism of the American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, failed to develop into a closer relationship, Bainbridge finding it limiting both harmonically and rhythmically.

His music was featured on six occasions at the BBC Proms, with Scherzi on the Last Night in 2005, and weightier works – including in 1998 Ad Ora Incerta (1994), and in 2012 the premiere of The Garden of Earthly Delights, which, like the Hieronymus Bosch triptych on which it is based, enacts a traversal from the Creation of the World through the Garden of Eden to the circles of hell.

Ad Ora Incerta, inspired by Primo Levi’s chronicle of life in the Buna concentration camp and by the composer’s own visit to Auschwitz, deploys unearthly sonorities and in the magnificently sustained elegiac finale a post-Mahlerian soundworld to evoke harrowing experiences. It won a Grawemeyer award (1997), from the the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

Bainbridge was a highly respected teacher, holding appointments at Edinburgh University (1976-78), the Royal College of Music (1989–99), the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (1991-99) and the Royal Academy of Music (1999–2007). His composition and contributions to public life effectively came to an end four years ago when unsuccessful spinal surgery resulted in great pain and immobility. He subsequently developed Parkinson’s disease.

In a 2013 interview he attributed his creative orientation to the fact that he was immersed, from the early years of his childhood, in the visual arts, in which both his parents were involved. His father, the artist John Bainbridge, was a painter from Sydney who also worked in advertising; his mother, Nan Bainbridge (nee Knowles), was a graphic artist similarly involved in advertising.

Born in London, Simon decided at the age of eight or nine that he wanted to become a composer and in 1965 attended the Central Tutorial School for Young Musicians, later to become the Purcell school. Its location at Morley College enabled him to sit in on rehearsals of the London Symphony Orchestra under such conductors as Otto Klemperer, Rudolf Kempe, Leopold Stokowski and Pierre Boulez. A friendship with his fellow student Oliver Knussen introduced him to Mahler’s symphonies and the Second Viennese School.

He went on to study composition with John Lambert and clarinet with Sidney Fell at the Royal College of Music (1969-72). By this time he had already come to public attention with the first of three pieces for large ensemble: Spirogyra (1970).

Another work of the 1970s, the Viola Concerto (1976), was a portent of what was to follow: a composition of intense introspection that demands patient listening, rarely exploiting the autumnal hued timbre of the solo instrument to conventional effect. In the first of its two movements any melodic impulses are waylaid by abrasive orchestral punctuations; only in the second movement is anything like a lyrical line unfolded, but even here Bainbridge’s concern is with layering and perspective rather than melody and harmony per se.

More immediately engaging was the Concertante in Moto Perpetuo (1983) for oboe and ensemble – a reworking of Music for Mel and Nora for oboe and piano (1979), using fragmentary minimalist ostinato patterns to drive the music forward. The Fantasia for Double Orchestra (1983–84) also dabbles with an idiosyncratic mode of minimalism, even opening with an enigmatic echo of Wagner’s recourse to the fundamentals of music in his prelude to Das Rheingold.

The Clarinet Quintet (1993) constitutes a total reimagining of the relationship between clarinet and strings as exemplified in the quintets of Mozart or Brahms, Bainbridge’s concern being to generate continuity and momentum from the accumulation of tension. The material takes time to coalesce out of the disembodied strands of the beginning, returning to a single note at the end.

Apart from Debussy, whose Jeux showed him the way forward from an early age, the greatest influence on him was probably that of Gyorgy Ligeti, with his exemplary use of micro-polyphony to create ravishing textural moments. Bainbridge similarly deployed what he called “timbral harmony” in his compositions: exploring aspects of textural density and “harmonic saturation”.

While his harmonic style was predominantly atonal, he did not make rigorous use of serialism, preferring to restrict it to providing a structural framework, as in the second movement of the Piano Trio (2008). His preoccupation with texture was graphically expressed by the way, in speaking of Debussy, he would partially close his eyes and slowly rub thumb and forefinger together like a silk merchant evaluating a piece of cloth.

Equally, the fastidiousness of his musical ear had a comic counterpart in his gift for mimicry, wickedly imitating the accents (especially American and Australian) of his colleagues.

His musical tastes were broad and embraced not only jazz greats such as Davis, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington, but also Broadway musicals such as Sweeney Todd and Carousel, and country and western favourites including Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette.

In 1997 he married the soprano and teacher Lynda Richardson, for whom he wrote Landscapes and Magic Words (1981). She and their daughter, the actor Rebecca Bainbridge, survive him.

• Simon Bainbridge, composer, born London, 30 August 1952; died 2 April 2021