BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's new season: newcomers, rarities and excitement

Thomas Dausgaard - BBC SSO (Photo BBC)

Under its chief conductor Thomas Dausgaard, the BBC Scotttish Symphony Orchestra's 2019/20 season is a mix of interesting new pieces and highlights of rarely performed ones. Thomas Dausgaard will conduct the premiere of a new concerto for electric violin and orchestra by Mexican composer Enrico Chapela, with soloist Pekka Kuusisto.  Dausgaard will also be conducting premieres by Emma-Ruth Richards, in the Scottish Inspirations series, and by Danish composer Bent Sørensen, as well as the UK premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s 'large-scale miniature for orchestra' Once I blinked nothing was the same (which premiered in Bamberg in 2015), plus works by Lisa Robertson, Maxwell Davies, Villa-Lobos and Toshio Hosokawa.

Principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov will be performing music by the Romanian composer Myriam Marbé (1931-1997) and will be pairing Luigi Nono’s Per Bastiana Tai-Yang Cheng with Brahms’s A German Requiem. Nono's piece was written in 1967 to celebrate the birth of his daughter and it uses a Chinese folk song with three instrumental groups playing in quarter tones and plus electronics (originally magnetic tape). Volkov is also conducting an evening dedicated to the music of Heinz Holliger.

Valentina Peleggi will be making her BBC SSO debut with Second Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman by Joan Tower, plus a new work from Roxanna Panufnik. Alondra de la Parra will be conducting music by the contemporary Mexican composer Arturo Márquez alongside Schubert, Mozart and Richard Strauss.

For those of a more traditional frame of mind, Martyn Brabbins presents Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings performed by Stuart Jackson and BBC SSO principal horn Alberto Menéndez Escribano, Antony Hermus conducts an orchestral adaptation of Wagner’s The Ring, and a Beethoven symphony cycle closes the season in May 2020 to mark Beethoven's 250th anniversary.

Full details from the BBC SSO website.