Name: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
Start: 2026-03-29T15:00:00
Location: Usher Hall

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

Karen Cargill

Sophie Bevan

Ryan Wigglesworth

David Stout

Alastair Miles

Huw Montague Rendall

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

With its sweeping melodies and raw emotion, Tchaikovsky’s famous Pathétique is a powerful exploration of love, loss and fate. It’s music that speaks from the heart, and under Principal Guest Conductor Delyana Lazarova’s baton, every note tells a story.

Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony

Music Hall, Aberdeen

City Halls

“She was such a quiet creature, wrapped in mystery as we all are…” In an ancient castle by a darkening sea, the princess Mélisande falls in love – and unlocks passions as deadly as they are beautiful. Moving, mysterious and heartbreakingly gorgeous, Debussy’s opera is woven from delicate emotions and violent rage; from sorrow entwined with wonder, and sounds so lovely that they can tear open your soul.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

Usher Hall

“In wars outside the blood runs red / Here is something far more deadly, ladies and gentlemen”. Duke Bluebeard’s castle has seven doors, and his new wife Judith is determined to open them all. But some questions are best left unanswered, and in Bartók’s gripping psychological thriller even the darkest secrets possess a terrible beauty.

Bartók’s Bluebeard's Castle

A born-and-raised Londoner, singer/cellist and composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson delves into the rich interplay of jazz and classical music as she explores the profound influence of jazz on her unique musical voice. This concert celebrates Scottish jazz legends—past and present—who have charted similar innovative paths.

Ayanna Witter-Johnson & Fergus McCreadie @ SWG3

SWG3 Glasgow

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

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

Old Fruitmarket

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

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)

Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists and music performed in Day 2 of Tectonics, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

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