Name: TECTONICS: Meet The Artists - Day 2
Start: 2026-05-03T19:00:00
Location: Scottish Music Centre

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

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.

TECTONICS: Meet The Artists - Day 2

Scottish Music Centre

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

City Halls and Old Fruitmarket

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

Old Fruitmarket

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

Described by composer Sir James MacMillan as “one of the most astonishing and surprising young newcomers in Scottish music,” Glasgow-born accordionist and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist (2022-24) Ryan Corbett is redefining expectations of his instrument. And in a concerto written especially for him, fellow Scot Jay Capperauld—praised for his “unbridled sonic imagination” (The Scotsman)—channels the crackling energy of electricity into music that dazzles.

Afternoon Performance: Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet

City Halls

The air shimmers, and a horn calls softly in the distance. Is there a more magical beginning to any symphony than the vista that opens Bruckner’s Fourth? No wonder he called it “Romantic”.

Closing Night: BBC Singers, Bruckner, Wigglesworth

A mysterious princess. A remote castle. A love triangle. Debussy’s breathtaking opera is a dark fairytale caught in a dream.

“No time, no place. No big scene.” So Debussy wrote to his teacher Ernest Guiraud in 1890. It was a kind of mission statement for his ideal style of opera: in a world of increasingly “big scenes” – courtesy of Wagner and Verdi – Debussy wanted something radically different.

After several false starts, he finally found what he was looking for in an enigmatic play by Maurice Maeterlinck called Pelléas et Mélisande, full of symbols, ambiguous meanings and shadowy characters. It was the perfect home for Debussy’s innovative approach to opera, and for his startlingly new musical language. He finished Pelléas et Mélisande, his only completed opera, in 1902. The critics were perplexed, but in more recent years it has become one of the most admired works in the repertoire, beguiling audiences time and again with its elusive, shimmering beauty.

Rory Kinnear directs a semi-staging of the opera, while Ryan Wigglesworth conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a dream of a cast, including Sophie Bevan and Jacques Imbrailo as the two lovers.

Aldeburgh Festival 2026: Pelléas et Mélisande

Snape Maltings

Music is reborn again and again in an orchestral concert of breathtaking originality: from Ravel’s jazz infusions of the 1920s to Wigglesworth’s time-tripping Concerto, you are invited to a world of limitless possibility.

Elizabeth Ogonek’s All These Lighted Things asks the orchestra to dance, drawing fascinating new sounds from every instrument. The composer remarks that the piece is about the casting away of darkness; that it expresses an “overwhelming…happiness and joy”. Inspired by Thomas Merton’s poem about the oneness of the spiritual universe, the third movement in particular depicts the orchestra as a kind of “community”

Ravel had a revelatory visit to the United States in 1928, where he heard George Gershwin at the Cotton Club in Harlem. He gave a lecture the same year, instructing American musicians to “Take Jazz Seriously!”, and took his own advice by paying a generous tribute to it in his sassy, sumptuous Piano Concerto in G. A few years earlier, Ravel had composed La Valse, a kind of “biography” of the waltz from elegant beginning to increasingly wild end.

Ryan Wigglesworth’s Piano Concerto slowly awakens into an intriguing soundworld, then looks back through musical history. Piano and orchestra engage in a quizzical, sometimes combative conversation on the subject of folksongs, chorales, and gigues.

Steven Osborne’s versatile and responsive style is perfect for both concertos: the playful Ravel and the intriguing, understated Wigglesworth.

Aldeburgh Festival 2026: BBC SSO and Steven Osborne

A rip-roaring tour of the orchestra and a Welcome to Ipswich: two of Britten’s most joyful and energetic works.

In the last two years of his life, Britten experienced an astonishing burst of creativity. From chamber pieces to songs to a full-blown cantata, he wrote some of his most enduringly popular and vigorous works while seriously weakened by illness. Welcome Ode was his final work, composed for the Queen’s visit to Ipswich in her Jubilee Year in 1977. Scored for children’s voices and orchestra, it is one of his most uninhibitedly upbeat works, with a delightfully outdoorsy spirit.

Another work for young people is Britten’s dazzling Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which is what it says on the tin: a comprehensive look at every participant in a symphony orchestra. Each instrument gets a go at the tune by Purcell on which the piece is based, sometimes solo, sometimes in intriguing combinations. Britten was reportedly so thrilled with the first recording of this work that he bounced up and down with excitement. You may find yourself doing the same – especially at the prospect of a new narration for the work, from eminent actor Rory Kinnear.

This performance will welcome an audience of young people from local schools and communities, with limited tickets available on general sale.

Aldeburgh Festival 2026: Welcome to the Orchestra

Steve Reich’s music is made of movement. Patterns shift, collide, and reform. The smallest rhythm grows into something vast. A single chord can shimmer like glass.

In Three Movements, the music constantly moves and turns. Repeating figures stretch and ripple until you lose track of where the downbeat lands. Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards is a kaleidoscope of colour. Chords slide past one another, glowing one moment, dissolving the next.

Electric Counterpoint, written for both pre-recorded and live guitars, turns repetition into a trance. With Bryce Dessner at its heart, expect a sound both mechanical and deeply human. Then The Four Sections pulls the whole orchestra into Reich’s pulsing universe – strings, winds, brass and percussion stacked into layers that vibrate with raw power.