BPO – Preview – Concert Season 2025-2026 – Joanna MacGregor CBE

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra Centenary Season was a triumph – how do you follow that? With more of the very best and perhaps even better! Music Director & CEO, the effervescent Joanna MacGregor, brought tension and excitement to the usually relaxed but now crowded and buzzing Dome Foyer Bar. Nine major events and three chamber concerts, dozens of exciting works and a host of top-rate performers with music that covers a wide range of interests. The aim is to fill the Dome for every event and bring in new audience to share the enjoyment of the faithful regulars who were sitting with their glasses of fizz eagerly waiting for the great reveal. This new season’s programme is a delicate balance of familiar favourites and music branded new, unknown, forgotten, ‘modern’, weird, different or in some other way challenging.

Joanna MacGregor CBE

Well, what a start! Sunday 28th September, MacGregor goes straight at it to conduct three very challenging yet popular works, all well over 100 years old. Rachmaninoff’s demanding 3rd Piano Concerto, the frenzied La Valse by Ravel and the “hellish music” of Bartók’s mysterious ballet suite, The Miraculous Mandarin. This will be a thrilling concert with MacGregor’s award-winning protégée Junyan Chen at the piano – a rare treat!

The second concert (Sunday 19 October) will be quite as magnificent. Mahler’s 5th Symphony, with its exquisite Adagietto (as used in Visconti’s Death in Venice), should bring in the crowds but it is the concerto that should take the laurels. The season’s cover artist, Elena Urioste, will perform Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto. His work is only recently coming back to the prominence it deserves. This concert should win him even more admirers.

Elena Urioste – credit Chris Goag

Joanna MacGregor began her reign of the BPO at the piano with Young Apollo, Britten’s dazzling overture, and she is reprising it to start the third concert (Saturday 8 November) that includes Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, with distinguished tenor Mark Padmore and BPO’s principal horn Alexei Watkins, two wonderful performers who will give us an evening to remember, and MacGregor will complete the programme with James MacMillan’s dynamic 2nd Piano Concerto.

On Sunday 7 December the Christmassy programme is distinctive for a quaintly atmospheric piece by Delius, Eventyr (Once Upon A Time), and a Concerto for Piano Accordion, both relating to European fairy tales, and concludes with Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite. Later that month Alistair McGowan and the BPO Brass Quintet return with MacGregor’s acclaimed presentation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this year on tour in Brighton, Lewes and Petworth, such has been the demand.

BPO will greet 2026 with virtuoso young trumpeter Aaron Azunda Akugbo and a Concerto by Wynton Marsalis (Sunday 24th January). This concert also has film music from Prospero’s Books and The Draughtsman’s Contract, two popular scores by Michael Nyman.

The next concert (Sunday 22 February) includes two Mozart delights, the Sinfonia Concertante K364 and the Piano Concerto No. 20 K466. A month later (Sunday 29th March) comes even more treasure: Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and two Seasons by Vivaldi and by Max Richter. These are followed by celebrated cellist Guy Johnston playing John Tavener’s mystic The Protecting Veil, a work that attracts enormous praise from young and old.

We haven’t had Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra since 2012 so it’s about time it returned (6.00pm, Saturday 18th April) along with a première of Concerto for Brazilian Percussion and Piano, composed by Joanna MacGregor for her inspirational pal Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale. This should be a happy riot! And to soothe the more traditional concert-goers, the second half will be Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bald Mountain and Stravinsky’s Scenes from Petrushka. All these should round off the season in excellent style. You don’t have to bring a child along to this concert but you can be sure they will enjoy it.

Incidentally, three significant works from this 2026 Season’s p rogramme, the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, were performed to great effect by the Brighton & East Sussex Youth Orchestra in their recent concert. Youngsters can get in for as little as £1 so our local young musicians and their families may well be taking up the best seats! Do check the BPO brochure and website for details of the Chamber Concerts and Masterclass at Brighton College – and don’t forget to look for the generous concessions, discounts and offers. It’s a very tempting programme and happily the Dome has been filling up well at recent concerts.

Andrew Connal
July 2025