BBC NOW 2026-27 Season War & Peace

War and peace meet in music of remembrance, journeying, and hard won joy. Ravel opens with Le Tombeau de Couperin, his 1917 suite reimagined for orchestra: Baroque dance forms refracted through glittering colour, sudden shifts of light and delicately layered sound.

Vaughan Williams then turns inward with Songs of Travel, sung here by baritone Steffan Lloyd Owen, tales of the wanderer shaped by folk song and hymn-like warmth.

The journey then turns north with Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor, a work that announces the arrival of a distinctive symphonic voice. Premiered in 1899, its brooding clarinet opening leads without pause into bold drama, while striking string and woodwind solos shape music alive with urgency and sweep. Though echoes of Tchaikovsky’s lyricism and Romantic intensity, the symphony speaks with unmistakable individuality, culminating in a hammering scherzo and a finale of stirring force.