BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Making America season explores the story of America through music
24 April – 22 May 2026
This spring, the BBC Symphony Orchestra embarks on Making America, a landmark concert series marking the 250th anniversary of American Independence. Across four concerts at the Barbican, London in April and May, the series offers a bold exploration of the myths, memories, dreams and contradictions that have shaped the American experience.
These concerts trace the Hollywood fantasy, the darker undercurrents of the American dream, Indigenous perspectives, and the voices of European exiles who reimagined their art in the New World.
The season includes the world premiere of Brent Michael Davids’s Requiem for America: Singing for the Invisible People featuringan ensemble of Native American singers alongside soloists Jennifer Johnston (contralto/narrator), Janai Brugger (soprano), Anne Marie Stanley (alto), Robert Murray (tenor) and Eric Greene (baritone).
- Making America: Blanchard, Herrmann & Latimer – Friday24 April 2026– Fabien Gabel conducts a cinematic journey, from Korngold’s The Sea Hawk to the psychological shadows of Herrmann’s suite from Vertigo. The programme also features a suite from Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones
and a new BBC co-commission and world premiere of Ryan Latimer’s Bestia: Concerto for Trumpet & Orchestra, performed by Selina Ott, inspired by the wildlife of Florida.
- Making America: Billy Childs’s Saxophone Concerto – Friday 8 May 2026 – Conductor Elena Schwarz conducts a programme that opens with Du Yun’s Hundred Heads, which imagines a mythical Chinese monster that somehow contains the spirit of jazz legend Ray Charles. The evening continues with the UK premiere of Billy Childs’s Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, performed by Steven Banks and inspired by the poetry of Maya Angelou. The concert culminates in John Adams’s Harmonielehre – a tribute to Schoenberg, celebration of West Coast counterculture, and a work that captures the American dream at its most turbulent and luminous.
- Making America: Requiem for America – Sunday 17 May 2026 –The world premiere of Brent Michael Davids’s Requiem for America: Singing for the Invisible People pairs Indigenous letters with founding-era genocidal texts to lay bare, state by state, the darker foundations of the United States of America. This urgent and unflinching work is conducted by Teddy Abrams and presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, an ensemble of Native American singers, and Davids himself plays the Native American flute.
- Making America: Oramo conducts Bartók & Korngold – Friday 22 May 2026– Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo leads a programme that traces the journeys of European composers who found themselves exiled in America, crafting new musical worlds from displacement and hope. The concert features Korngold’s Violin Concerto, performed by the sensational Spanish violinist María Dueñas, and Bartók’s dazzling Concerto for Orchestra.