'The Beating Heart of Brighton' - the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra's 2026/27 Season

After another successful and imaginative season only just coming to a close last month, the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra have launched details of their next season, and it promises some exciting and interesting events. At their launch event on 23 April, we were entertained by a short performance by two beneficiaries of the BPO’s Spring Forwards scheme, which supports and mentors young music graduates to perform in the orchestra. Cellist Emily Henderson and violist Athalie Armon-Jones gave a graceful and poised performance of Beethoven’s Eyeglasses Duo, Variations on ‘Se vuol ballare’, followed by arrangements of three of Bartók’s Duos for two violins, played with lively rhythmic energy, both players proving worthy advocates for BPO’s investment in young talent.

 

The main season proper starts in September, but it’s great to see them returning to the Brighton Festival this month, with a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, conducted by their Music Director, Joanna MacGregor. For this performance, they’ve joined forces with artist and filmmaker William Kentridge, who has made an animated film, ‘Oh to Believe in Another World’, using puppets, collage and masked actors. Kentridge, who also directs Glyndebourne’s new production of L’Orfeo from June, will introduce the film onstage, making connections between Shostakovich’s complex relationship with the Soviet Union state, and the politics of oppression in Kentridge’s native South Africa and around the world.

 

Joanna MacGregor continues with her creative and interesting programming choices in the autumn. As ever, there are familiar crowd pleasers – Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in September, Mozart’s ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade in October, and Pachelbel’s Canon in November – but they all sit within programmes full of variety and less standard fare. 

 

Khrystyna Mykhailichenko

20-year-old Ukrainian pianist Khrystyna Mykhailichenko will perform the Rachmaninov in September, preceded by Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, with Janáček’s glorious Sinfonietta following, with Piazzolla’s Primavera Porteña, played by violinist Emily Trubshaw, thrown in for good measure. 

 

In previous seasons, the strings and percussion sections of the BPO have had their chance to shine alone. October’s concert now showcases the wind section (plus some of the brass), with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, with Milda Daunoraite the piano soloist in the latter. This is followed by Mozart’s exquisite ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade for 13 wind instruments. The wind section has been particularly on form in recent concerts, so this is definitely one to look out for. 

 

Eric Vloeimans

Jazz has also featured regularly in MacGregor’s programming, and November’s concert brings Dutch trumpeter, composer, record producer and songwriter Eric Vloeimans, with an eclectic programme, including the premiere of his new work, Innermission. The programme includes his jazz take on Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – or Dido and Aeneazz, as he has called it – and there’s Rameau, Couperin and that famous Pachelbel in the mix, all no doubt with fresh jazz-infused interpretations from Vloeimans, with MacGregor conducting and on piano. They are also taking the programme to Kings Place in London – good to see some orchestral traffic in the opposite direction to the norm.

 

December brings a suitably icy programme to the Brighton Dome, with Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica, in which he drew on his score for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic to create his seventh symphony. The upper voices of the Brighton Festival Chorus join to provide the ethereal wordless chorus, and exceptional soprano Elizabeth Watts is the soloist. The concert also includes La Sindone by Arvo Pärt, and Jonny Greenwood’s Water, a work for strings, flutes and Indian tanpura, inspired by Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name. The tanpura will be played by Bishi, a fabulously talented and versatile performer. I recently saw her in the Brighton Festival in The Age of Consent, a moving and timely recreation of the seminal album from Bronski Beat, on that occasion singing and playing the sittar. The Greenwood will also be performed alongside live visuals from Kathy Hinde. Sibelius’ atmospheric, sweeping The Swan of Tuonela completes the programme.

 

Alistair McGowan

The BPO Brass Quintet are joined again by narrator Alistair McGowan for their now traditional and highly popular rendition of A Christmas Carol, this year taking it to four churches across Sussex, including Lewes, Petworth and Alfriston, as well as St George’s in Kemptown, Brighton. 

 

And so to 2027, and they kick off in January with Joanna playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, coupled with John Adams’ mighty choral work, Harmonium, for which they are joined by Brighton Festival Chorus, with the baton in the assured hand of Alice Farnham. They open with Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s Sussex Landscape, a darkly expressive piece composed in 1939, around the time she moved to Buxted in Sussex. Daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, she had a successful career as a pianist, conductor and composer, and her music is receiving something of a revival in interest of late.

Jacqui Dankworth

Joanna MacGregor said in her overview of the season that she doesn’t really buy into the whole Valentine’s Day thing, so has subverted the theme for their concert on 14 February. ‘Bad Girls and Heartbreakers’ features music from Bizet’s Carmen, as well as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, as well as three songs of love and loss by Kurt Weill, sung by Jacqui Dankworth (who also narrates the Shostakovich). The BPO welcome back Geoffrey Paterson to conduct, and squeezed in the middle of the programme is Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, perhaps a more conventional choice – but then we know how that story ends too…

 

Joanna MacGregor

They move from winter into spring in March with Harrison Birtwistle’s epic The Triumph of Time, inspired by Bruegel’s procession of Time leading Death whilst life carries on seemingly unaware in the background. The BPO will then lead us, via Debussy’s orchestrations of Satie’s Gympnopédies, to Stravinsky’s blazing Firebird Suite. 

 

And for the April climax of their season, somewhat of a coup for MacGregor and the orchestra. Nigel Kennedy (remarkably celebrating his 70^th birthday in December) will perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, along with his arrangements of Jimi Hendrix's music. It can’t be often that Beethoven and Hendrix share the concert platform, and what better way to exemplify MacGregor’s continually inventive programming.

 

Check out Joanna MacGregor’s regular short lectures, The Listening Club, in which she delves into the music, usually a week or so before the concert. And Joanna and the orchestra’s principals will be presenting chamber music concerts at Brighton College, with masterclasses for students earlier in the day. Alongside their Spring Forwards scheme, they are also launching Brighton Spring, to take performances, workshops and collaborations to schools across Sussex.

 

Details of all concert dates and tickets (on sale now) here.