Four Primo Levi Settings (1996)

That dark character cropped up again with a more overtly mournful and sometimes eerie cast in Simon Bainbridge’s “Four Primo Levi Settings” (1996) for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, viola and piano. These Italian settings dance between gracefulness and ponderousness, and Mary Nessinger moved deftly between those extremes, giving her best performance in “Da RM Rilke,” the cycle’s haunting, gently chromatic finale.

Bainbridge has definitely come of age, and the somber intensity of Levi’s texts obviously inspired him to produce what I believe to be his finest work so far. Exquisitely written, uncompromisingly intense and genuinely moving, this is one the finest song cycles British music has produced since Britten.
Review in full

One might imagine that Simon Bainbridge would have exhausted his Primo Levi vein in the overwhelmingly intense settings he made with orchestral accompaniment last year (Ad ora incerta). But something was evidently left unsaid, and this has now borne fruit in a new cycle… Some composers escape from overpowering impressions into their opposite: the lightweight or the abstract. Bainbridge has simply written four more songs of the same dark intensity as before… These are again beautiful if draining pieces, 15 minutes or so of exquisite gloom, sustained with real mastery, decorative but never straying into the picturesque.