Gianandrea Noseda conducts the BBC Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Ninth, with a UK premiere from Jessie Montgomery and cellist Abel Selaocoe.

Programme

JS Bach, orch. A Davis Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542
Jessie Montgomery These Righteous Paths (BBC co-commission: UK premiere)
Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, ‘Choral’

Abel Selaocoe (cello)
Leah Hawkins (soprano)
Stephanie Wake-Edwards (mezzo-soprano)
Derek Welton (bass)
Philharmonia Chorus · BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Gianandrea Noseda

Monday 20 July 2026 · 7pm–c9.20pm
Royal Albert Hall

Listen on BBC Radio 3 / BBC Sounds · Watch on BBC iPlayer (recorded for broadcast)

Preview

Two big pulls for this concert. The first is cellist Abel Selaocoe — a performer who brings an electric energy to the stage the moment he walks onto it. He’s giving the UK premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s These Righteous Paths, a work that draws on the poetry and plays of the composer’s late mother, Robbie McCauley, a significant figure in Black American theatre after the Civil Rights era. Written partly as an act of grief, the piece draws on the African diaspora and its inheritances — guided by the Ghanaian Sankofa concept, the idea that looking back is what enables you to move forward. The music is built around Selaocoe’s distinctive range as a cellist and vocalist, weaving together baroque, song, Afro-centric rhythm and improvisation. Montgomery describes the form as restless but grounded, sometimes arriving at melodies so familiar they feel remembered rather than composed.

Beethoven’s Ninth has form as a symbol of political hope — most memorably in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Leonard Bernstein conducted it with musicians from both sides of the divide, replacing Schiller’s “Freude” with “Freiheit” — freedom. History is layered onto the annual Proms performance of this work such that its regularity makes the Proms Beethoven 9 an almost spiritual experience. There remain only a few works in the repertoire that generate this particular kind of collective experience: the sense, after an hour or more, of having arrived somewhere together. Its rousing conclusion is what most reach for, though the slow third movement contains some of Beethoven’s most tender melodic writing. It’s also a peculiarly British work, commissioned by the Philharmonic Society, now known as the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Review

This review will be published following the concert.

Gallery

Photography will be added once available.