New season plans for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and the BBC Singers

Paul Hughes is the General Manager responsible for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC Singers. The job involves keeping a giddying calendar of dates stretching years hence, in his head. In this blog, Paul reflects on the 2015-16 season which has just been announced.

I find this a strange time of the planning year, when the present season is well over half way through. the new season has just gone public and my mind is focused on the season yet-to-be planned and the last few details of the Proms season ahead. I know this to be true when a friend asked me what we are doing next season and my mind went blank ‒ full of this week’s concert and the ideas for 2016-2017 that are swirling around in my head. And then I got home and went straight to the laptop to be reminded, as a smile crept over my face, of a season as full of musical adventures and journeys, pleasures and indulgences as you would expect of the BBCSO.

Any concert conducted by Sakari Oramo is a major event these days and his season-opening Mahler 3 will be unmissable, setting out a series of concerts that are truly inspired, including symphonies by Elgar, and Strauss’s monumental Alpine Symphony, but perhaps my favourite of Sakari’s programmes will showcase the orchestra section by section, with Schoenberg’s transcendental Verklärte Nacht for strings, Mozart’s sublime Gran Partita for wind ensemble, and bringing the whole orchestra together in a nostalgic evocation of old Vienna, Strauss’ suite from the opera Der Rosenkavalier. 

Our Total Immersion days of discovery explore the music of two recently departed European greats, Henryk Górecki and Henri Dutilleux and one very much alive master ‒ Louis Andriessen. In fact Andriessen’s rich, irreverent and exuberant take on Dante, La Commedia ‒ part opera, part music-theatre ‒ this large-scale work is followed by two further operatic and completely contrasting collaborations with Opera Rara: Zaza by Leoncavallo and Adelson e Salvini by Bellini. Fans of great singing will remember our electrifying sell-out performance of Donizetti’s Belisario in 2012.

Commissions and premieres sit at the heart of what we do and with new works from Richard Ayres, Anna Clyne, George Benjamin and Ryan Wigglesworth leading the British contingent, and Andrew Norman, Brett Dean, Henryk Górecki and Richard Dubugnon showing how much exciting new music is being written around the world, there are many musical adventures waiting to be shared. In fact, finding just the right context for a new work ‒ the ‘frame’, if you will ‒ is one of the great pleasures of introducing new works to our audiences.

Renée Fleming, one of the greatest sopranos of our time, returns to work with us in a new song cycle written for her by the Swedish composer Anders Hillborg, alongside Robin Holloway’s exquisite orchestrations of Debussy songs. Jiří Bělohlávek will conduct a programme that should carry a health warning, so rich is the musical fare on offer. Renée leads a whole host of glittering soloists and one of our strongest ever list of conductors; I would like to pay a particular welcome to Polish maestro Antoni Wit making his BBCSO debut and the long-overdue return of Markus Stenz.

Of course, I don’t just have the privilege of managing the BBC Symphony Orchestra but also the outstanding BBC Symphony Chorus who will be featuring in a number of great choral works especially from the 20th century. Edward Gardner and I have taken particular pleasure in recent years of planning a December programme that has nothing seasonal about it, and this year will be no different ‒ Tippett’s A Child of our Time with its profound spiritual choruses punctuating Tippett’s own anti-war text will, in Ed’s hands, be profoundly moving and unmissable.

Programming with the BBC Singers is like having another set of toys to play with and the wonderful virtuosic artistry they display thrills me every time. I’m particularly looking forward to heading over to the luxurious acoustics of Milton Court at the Barbican for David Hill conducting Monteverdi’s great Vespers of 1610, when we’re joined by the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini and St James’s Baroque, and James O’Donnell taking time off from his day job at Westminster Abbey to direct Handel’s magnificent theatrical oratorio Saul, with a terrific cast including the wonderful Iestyn Davies. As a life-long listener to R3 and R4, the mixture of spoken word and music has always been close to my heart, and so the chance to explore the heart-breaking poetry and musical settings of, and inspired by the battle of the Somme, contrasted with that most enchanting of seasonal stories ‒ Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales ‒ wrapped up in favourite and new carols will, for me, be irresistible. Familiar faces and voices will join us for to narrate these concerts in Milton Court. I’m feeling all toasty at the prospect already!

Whether you join us a season listener, a new audience member, or a willing participant in one of the many audience-friendly learning events we offer, everyone will be enormously welcome. And if you can’t make it along to see the music and thrill to its sounds, then R3 will be there to broadcast it for you. That’s the wonderful thing about the BBC - you can have it both ways, and listen to it again!

• BBC Symphony Orchestra
• BBC Symphony Chorus
• BBC Singers