Sakari Oramo leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two concerts at the Aldeburgh Festival, showcasing his flair for innovative programming and deep musical sensitivity.

On 21 June, Oramo is joined by 2025 Featured Artist Leila Josefowicz to give the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto. The programme opens with another contemporary work from a featured artist — Daniel Kidane’s Awake, written for Oramo who led the premiere at the 2019 BBC Proms. In the second half, the programme turns back to the late Romantic era, with two meditations on life (and its end) by Richard Strauss: Death and Transfiguration and the transcendent Four Last Songs, sung by Anu Komsi.

On  22 June, Oramo and the BBC Symphony return for another programme, equally searching and varied. The programme opens with Grime’s Night Songs, which the orchestra premiered in 2012, followed by Benjamin Britten’s little-known song cycle Our Hunting Fathers with tenor Allan Clayton. Written in the late 1930s as war loomed, the work is a call to peace before it is too late. The programme continues with the world premiere of Brian Elias’s Horn Concerto, performed by Ben Goldschneider, and finishes in Oramo’s native Finland, with Sibelius’ resoundingly hopeful Fifth Symphony.

On 24 June, Oramo returns to the Festival, this time as a violinist. With soprano Anu Komsi, he gives an intimate performance of György Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragments, an hour-long duet for soprano and solo violin which navigates through 40 scraps of text by Franz Kafka, including excerpts from his diaries and letters.