Name: Afternoon Performance: Alban Gerhardt Plays Britten's Cello Symphony
Start: 2026-03-12T14:00:00
Location: City Halls

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is set to astound audiences with its 2026 season, featuring a diverse array of performances that blend classical masterpieces with contemporary artistry. From the soul-stirring harmonies of Rachmaninov to the mesmerizing narratives of Debussy and Bartók, this season promises an immersive musical experience. Join us as we explore the key events, artists, and compositions that define this remarkable series of concerts, showcasing talents like Alessio Bax, Imogen Cooper, and Ryan Wigglesworth.

A Symphony of Emotions: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 2026 Season Highlights

Experience an orchestral journey with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2026, featuring a stellar line-up of performances from Rachmaninov's soul-stirring concertos to Mahler's cosmic symphony, and contemporary gems like Britten's expressive compositions. Immerse yourself in music that spans a range of emotions, settings, and stories, through a series of events across Scotland, bringing together world-renowned performers and a diversity of musical genres.

A Symphony of Emotions: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 2026 Highlights

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's 2026 concert series promises a musical journey like no other, featuring an array of performances that span genres and styles. From the expressive depths of Britten's Cello Symphony to the enigmatic allure of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, each event showcases the exceptional talent of artists like Alban Gerhardt and Delyana Lazarova. With concerts exploring themes of love, loss, and identity, this series is set to engage, challenge, and inspire audiences across the UK.

A Symphony of Emotions: BBC SSO's Diverse 2026 Concert Series

Alban Gerhardt

Ryan Wigglesworth

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

In 'Minding the hive', Christopher Fox explores the remarkable tonal resources of Lore Amenabar Larrañaga’s self-designed quartertone accordion. These sounds become a focal point for the orchestra’s music, as different groupings of instruments create swarms of sonic activity around her. The music takes inspiration from the ways bees communicate, interrelate, work, and even “dance” to convey the precise location of food and water.

Laura Bowler, a “triple-threat composer-performer-provocatrice” (The Arts Desk), offers a humorous yet incisive reflection on the pressures of everyday life, inspired by Lucy Ellmann’s essay ‘Things Are Against Us’. “The work is propulsive, unrelenting, and overwhelming for the soloists as they battle through the eventually overpowering surrounds,” Bowler explains. In this setting of Ellmann’s text, the GBSR Duo embodies the “things,” while the orchestra (representing the global) extends and amplifies these forces. Bowler herself stands for “us”: the human experience, caught in the midst of a turbulent rollercoaster ride.

In Star Washers, Angélica Castelló contemplates stars in all their manifestations, “from the ones we find, one afternoon, crushed on the street, to the ones in the sky… It’s also about stars in my life: stars who inspire and accompany my creative path,” she explains. Castelló blends orchestra, electronics and the recorded voice of the supremely gifted Barbara Hannigan, which emerges as a mysterious appearance… like a voice from outer space.

TECTONICS: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1

City Halls and Old Fruitmarket

Content warning In this performance, the artist seeks to portray the overwriting of a survivor’s pain, exploring themes relating to sexual and domestic abuse.

Callie Rose Petal is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and semiotician from Glasgow. She is the creator of a theory-fiction field ‘Lexicomythography’ comprising language art, ritual composition and software, a critique of the exclusionary nature of academic publishing. She confronts the violence of language through the language of violence. Releasing sound/noise/durational works under the pseudonym ⁿᵒᵗBorges, her praxis engages distortive breakdown as compositional force, as a mirror of the disabled trans body. In all her works, loss, grief, otherness and survivorhood emerge as structural generators of affect and form. Released on Venalism, the label describes the performance of ‘lamb.’ as a “swirling vortex of tumultuous discord and flagrant, rapturous emotion that cleaves itself open and allows the incandescence and volatility of its intention to spill out—and fully overwhelm—the listener”.

TECTONICS: Callie Rose Petal (ⁿᵒᵗBorges)

Old Fruitmarket

British composer Hannah Kendall’s music is “searingly impactful” (The New Statesman), bridging musical cultures while both honouring and challenging contemporary traditions. The title of this work is from Lemn Sissay’s poem Godsell, reflecting on the biblical figure of Lot’s wife. As Kendall explains: “Part of the string ensemble has their instruments altered by dreadlock cuffs, which are malleable metallic Afro hair accessories. The strings are bound together by the cuffs making pitch production unpredictable, as well as creating a harsh, yet often brittle and fragile sound quality... Perhaps I see something of myself in Lot's wife: her ‘disobedience’ lies in looking back; mine in ‘disobeying,’ or at least rubbing up against, the norms of how Western classical instruments are expected to be played and sound.”

TECTONICS: BBC SSO Strings play Hannah Kendall

Angélica Castelló is a Mexican–Austrian composer, recorder player, improviser, sound artist and magnetophonic tape weaver. Her music evokes both the beauty and challenge of being alive through electroacoustic spells that summon memory, death, solace, trauma, resilience, fragility, and the oneiric realm of the subconscious. Espacio ∞ is an ongoing composition without a final form. Castelló seeks to create textures similar to swarms, clouds of noise and wind, abysses of sine waves and water sounds, blending the sounds of a live instrument with electronic sounds and, in the electronic mix, those of analogue machines, broken radios, old tapes, and purely crystalline field recordings. The music remains perpetually in motion, continuously transforming, and resisting any sense of final closure.

TECTONICS: Angélica Castelló

Born in Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years. In performances and recordings as a soloist, bandleader and sideman, Taborn brings a fearless and sophisticated approach to music-making. He draws from musical traditions as varied as traditional and contemporary jazz, contemporary classical, experimental, electronic, rock, metal, and hip-hop. His constant exploration of genre and style informs his own distinct musical intelligence and voice.

TECTONICS: Craig Taborn

Danielle is finding Chops. A merging together of tuba, voice and words.

Danielle Price is a Scottish tuba artist and improviser, described as a “magician-musician, whose dexterity, courage and playfulness on the tuba is breathtaking” (Aby Vulliamy). Exploring a range of creative outlets using tuba and voice, she has worked with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Ali Affleck, Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat, and Scottish Ballet. She is one half of tuba duo Dopey Monkey with Martin Lee Thomson, plays in the band Pejla with drummer Adrian Ortman, and regularly collaborates with Bill Wells, as the Sensory Illusions (Karaoke Kalk). Her debut solo EP “After the Allotments” was released by OTOROKU in 2022.

TECTONICS: Danielle Price

Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists and music performed in Day 1 of Tectonics, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson.

TECTONICS: Meet The Artists - Day 1

Scottish Music Centre

BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show presenter Kate Molleson describes Oliver Leith’s 2018 composition as “deadpan, subversive, quietly anarchic, disarmingly heart-sore and sweet-sour,” music that makes “masterful use of space, placement, sparse forces and really deft repetition.” Leith calls it a tender look at the simultaneously debilitating and beautiful irrationalities of our everyday lives; how our obsessions and compulsions surface and the rituals, superstitions and routines we all play out to appease our minds… and how that never really works. Created in collaboration with the GBSR Duo (percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys, recipients of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award 2025), the work offers disarming reflections on performance, relationships, codependency and mental health, staged within an instrument-strewn setting inspired by the duo’s own flat.

TECTONICS: GBSR Duo

In the process of composing, Naomi Pinnock tapes a collection of images, quotes, and words to the wall behind her desk, describing them as “guideposts… stones to touch for the sometimes blind journey of making.” The work’s title is a quote by Amy Sillman, whose paintings unfold in layers with possibly dozens of other potential paintings beneath the surface—paths not taken, layers covered, a visceral searching for emergent shapes.

Martin Smolka also finds inspiration in the drawings, quotes, and notes kept on his desk. He writes, “I weave various pieces of paper between the strings of the talking drum,” a wooden hourglass-shaped African instrument. Among them is the ancient Seikilos Song: “As long as you're alive, shine, don't be sad at all; life is short, time asks for its due.” Guided by these words and “without censorship by my compositional intellect”, Smolka played freely at his piano, imagining meadows, streams, birds, trees, and clouds, gradually shaping what endured into delicate, mostly quiet orchestral sounds.

The BBC commission and world premiere that ends this concert is written by Nicole Mitchell, a creative flutist, composer, bandleader, and educator. Founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Ice Crystal, and Sonic Projections, Mitchell’s music celebrates African American culture while reaching across genres and integrating new ideas with moments in the legacy of jazz, gospel, experimentalism, pop, and African percussion.

TECTONICS: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 2

French experimental instrument builder Frédéric Le Junter made a strong impression at Tectonics Glasgow’s virtual festival in 2021. Now, he transports his “weird and wonderful musical contraptions” (The Scotsman) to the Recital Room at City Halls.

At the age of 5, Le Junter was deeply impressed by the sounds and visual material of the harbour in Dunkirk, where he was born. At 28, inspired by chaotic phenomena such as meteorology, and by complexity more broadly, he began crafting instruments and mechanical sound machines that play with hesitation and instability. Since the 1980s, he has created over 150 instruments.

TECTONICS: Recital Room Installation - Frédéric Le Junter

Longtime collaborators in the jazz and improvisational music scene, flutist Nicole Mitchell and pianist Craig Taborn first played together over 20 years ago when Taborn was part of Mitchell’s Sonic Projections ensemble. In 2024, after an inspired performance at a festival where the duo was invited to imagine a legendary but undocumented meeting of Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy, they decided to make the duo a regular part of their busy performance schedules. Inspired by the creative spirits of Taylor and Dolphy, the two composer-instrumentalists have created a collection of pieces for the duo that foster and ignite spontaneous musical dialogues and explorations in each performance. Their shared interest in electronic treatments and textures, along with their efforts to expand the possibilities of piano and flute performance, yields a broad, diverse sonic landscape rooted in an intimate musical setting.

TECTONICS: Nicole Mitchell & Craig Taborn

Saint Abdullah is the moniker of Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani (b. Tehran, 1986, 1988), currently based between Tehran and London. Their practice is rooted in sonic storytelling that seamlessly blends geo-politics, religion, and social behaviour. The brothers have developed a sophisticated studio practice exploring improvisation, electronics, plunderphonics, and sampling. Their music has been described as at once Western and Eastern, while belonging to no one and everyone—“an articulation of a perspective, emotion, and dialogue using sound as its foundation”, in their own words. Over the past eight years, Saint Abdullah has collaborated with acclaimed artists including Jason Nazary, Eomac, Abbas Zahedi and Armand Hammer (ELUCID, Billy Woods).

TECTONICS: Saint Abdullah

Commissioned in 1945 by the Ministry of Education for a children’s film titled “Instruments of the Orchestra”, Britten’s cheery tour de force is the perfect excuse to show off the considerable talents of the BBC SSO’s individual players. You’ll also be stunned by the “consummate artistry” (The Guardian) of Alban Gerhardt as he performs Britten’s deeply expressive Cello Symphony, originally written for the great Russian virtuoso Mstislav Rostropovich.

Afternoon Performance: Alban Gerhardt Plays Britten's Cello Symphony

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