Nigel Kennedy's Beethoven, epic Birtwistle, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth: Joanna MacGregor & Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra announce their 2026/27 season

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra & Joanna MacGregor (Photo: Frances Marshall)

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, pianist Joanna MacGregor are joined by a host of talent for the orchestra's 2026/27 season. Violinist Nigel Kennedy, who celebrates his 70th birthday this year (!) joins them for Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Kennedy's own arrangements of Jimi Hendrix. 

Mezzo-soprano Jacqui Dankworth joins conductor Geoffrey Patterson and the orchestra for songs by Kurt Weill in a programme called Bad Girls and Heartbreakers which also features James Conlon's suite from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and music by Tchaikovsky and Bizet. Actor Alastair MacGowan joins MacGregor and musicians from the orchestra for the return of their Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol programme. The season opens with a concert where they are joined by the 20-year-old Ukrainian pianist Khrystyna Mykhailichenko for Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini plus Gerswhin in Cuba, Piazzolla in Buenos Aires and Janáček's astonishing Sinfonietta.

Musical highlights include Harrison Birtwistle's The Triumph of Time in a programme alongside Debussy's orchestrations of Satie and Stravinsky's Firebird. Avril Coleridge-Taylor's composing talent is finally coming out from under her father's shadow and Alice Farnham conducts her brooding tone-poem Sussex Landscape in a programme that also includes John Adam's mighty Harmonium and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with MacGregor as soloist. In a terrific programme MacGregor conducts Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica alongside Jonny Greenwood's Water which was inspired by the Philip Larkin poem of that name and features strings, flutes and Indian tanpura, Sibelius' The Swan of Tuonela and Arvo Part's La Sindone which was written for the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006.

An intriguing and rather clever pairing is Stravinsky's Symphonies for Wind Instruments and Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments with soloist Milda Daunoraite (both works from the 1920s) with Mozart's great wind serenade, the Gran Partita which dates from 1784.

Something of an oddity is a jazz-infused programme centred on Dutch trumpeter and composer Eric Vloeimans where the music includes Vloeimans take on Purcell with Dido and Aeneazz alongside his versions of other Baroque classics and a new work for the orchestra Innermission.

Joanna MacGregor's own commitment to the orchestra is striking, of the nine main concerts in the season she is participating in eight (as conductor and/or pianist). And Thursdays before the Sunday concerts she is presenting Listening Club, hour-long illustrated informal lectures designed to illuminated and entertain.

Full details from the orchestra's website.