BBC Symphony Orchestra 2025/26 Jack Sheen conducts New Music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra

Turn your ears inside out, as the BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrates three composers who find music in the impossible. Martin Smolka - Czech music’s self-proclaimed “hooligan” - takes a piano concerto and knocks it backwards. Silence speaks louder than sound, in Rebecca Saunders’s haunting Traces. Of Oliver Leith's Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance, the composer says ‘I pictured an orchestra wheeled out for a party on a lawn in front of the portico of a large house – playing this piece surrounded by burbling guests and fountains.’

As the 21st century lurches into its second quarter, these, it seems, are the sounds that reveal our world: three sonic tales for our times, by turns irreverent, intelligent and beautiful beyond words. Bit of a shocker? Or exactly what you’d expect from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - conducted today by Jack Sheen, and starring pianist Joseph Havlat in Smolka’s glittering anti-concerto?