BPO – Preview 2026/27 Season – Joanna MacGregor (Music Director), Athalie Armon-Jones (viola), Emily Henderson (cello)

Wow! The new season is astonishing – in the very best way. Last Saturday we were all delighted by one of the stars of the BPO’s Spring Forwards mentoring scheme when Xiaowen Shang showed her quality in the fiendish piano part of Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

The 2026/27 Season was launched with duets by Beethoven and Bartók. The Eyeglass Duo was ten minutes of charming formality, a delicate conversation, beautifully balanced, perfectly suited to the occasion. So too were the three short Bartók duos, ‘spicy’ was Joanna MacGregor’s apt description. Athalie and Emily are also recent music graduates benefiting from the Spring Forwards scheme as they launch into their professional careers. On this hearing alone we can tell they will go far.

Athalie Armon-Jones & Emily Henderson

So, with all our musical senses heightened by the concert, Maestra MacGregor revealed the treats of her new season. Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 – What an opening event! (Sunday evening 17 May), preceded ten days before, Thursday 7 May, by a new regular item, an hour-long The Listening Club, in which Joanna MacGregor will share her understanding of the concert programme which includes William Kentridge’s animated film Oh To Believe in Another World.

The season continues on 27 September with another super selection: Gershwin, Piazzolla and Rachmaninoff’s glorious Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini featuring MacGregor’s prodigious Ukrainian protegée at the Royal Academy of Music, Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, already a world-class star at the age of 20. That Sunday afternoon with end up ringing to the brass fanfares of Janáček’s heroic Sinfonietta.

October will give us a gala for the wind section of the orchestra, The Stravinsky Connection, that starts with two of his majestic works for woodwind from the 1920s. Over 100 years old they still sound impressively modern and exciting. The Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments will bring another star soloist from the Royal Academy of Music, Milda Daunoraite. After such an impressive warm-up, the wind players will continue with Mozart’s sublime ‘Gran Partita’, a pinnacle of the concert repertoire.

A Thursday evening in November brings us a intriguing mixture of Baroque and Jazz, when Joanna MacGregor performs Pachelbel, Couperin, Rameau and Purcell with her Dutch pal, trumpeter Eric Vloeimans. The programme includes the première of Vloeimans’ Fatima; Innermission and his jazz styled Dido and Aeneazz. The Listening Club will be most helpful if it can reassure us that the Purcell hasn’t been compromised.

Let’s hope for a sunny Sunday afternoon in December, because the programme has a chilly, damp touch to it. Arvo Pärt, Sibelius and Jonny Greenwood and the awe inspiring ‘Sinfonia antartica’ of Vaughan Williams. The female voices of Brighton Festival Chorus will be joined by soprano Elizabeth Watts, whose note in the programme mentions the great US conductor Michael Tilson Thomas who has died just this week. This concert also features pop artist Bishi on the tanpura, a distinctive Indian instrument, and a live display of visuals by Kathy Hinde. December also presents Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol 2026, this year touring Sussex with Alistair McGowan to venues in Petworth, Lewes, Alfriston and Brighton.

Saturday 23 January evening begins with a delightful short tone poem, Sussex Landscape by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, who lived most of her long life in Sussex. Joanna MacGregor will then be the soloist for Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto. The full strength of Brighton Festival Chorus will join BPO in the powerful and climactic Harmonium by John Adams.

Bad Girls and Heartbreakers is the fare for the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, Sunday 14 February, with Bizet, Weill and Shostakovich matching the theme and only Tchaikovsky bringing the romance, but also tragedy, of Romeo and Juliet.

Spring (Sunday afternoon 21 March) brings a mysterious and lovely half hour of The Triumph of Time by Harrison Birtwistle, then Debussy’s sensual orchestrations of two of Satie’s mystic Gymnopédies, all leading up to more Stravinsky, the fantastical and exhilarating Firebird.

The 2026/27 season ends with a magnificent gala climax when Nigel Kennedy returns to Sussex to celebrate his 70th birthday, this coming December, playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and his own arrangements of Jimi Hendrix. This will be a very special event indeed!

BPO’s Spring Forwards scheme is a sure investment in future music and musicians, as is Brighton Spring, BPO’s brand-new ensemble of young professionals who will perform outreach concerts and workshops at schools around Sussex, bringing top-class music to many more young folk. In The Listening Club, which happens mainly on Thursdays across the road in the Brighton Unitarian Church, Joanna MacGregor will bring more understanding of each concert, professional insights, things to focus on and possibly even some gossip.

I do hope that she will continue to give us her informal chats from the stage too. They do so much to bring the crowd together and make the vastness of the Dome seem quaintly more intimate and friendly.

Andrew Connal
Brighton Dome Concert Hall,
23 April 2026

Rating:

Joanna MacGregor – Music Director
Athalie Armon-Jones – viola
Emily Henderson – cello

Programme:
Beethoven –Duett mit zwei obligaten Augengläsern in E flat major ‘Eyeglass Duo’, WoO32
Bartók – three duos for viola and cello