2025-2026 Season

The BBC Singers have long held a unique place at the heart of the UK’s choral scene, collaborating with many of the world’s leading composers, conductors, and soloists. Together with the Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris, they perform Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, one of the pinnacles of vocal art featuring a double choir singing a cappella.

In the 19th century, a new genre emerged: the symphonic poem, based on an extra-musical, literary, or pictorial theme. During a stay in Paris, Rachmaninoff was literally captivated by Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and composed a work recreating the funereal atmosphere of the painting. Fifteen years later, Marcel Dupré composed his Symphonie-Passion, akin to a symphonic poem evoking the life of Christ.

Two masterpieces by Stravinsky, polar opposites, come together here: alongside the Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris, a brass octet and organists Olivier Latry and Shin-Young Lee confront these two facets, so dissimilar yet equally fascinating.

A true golden age of music, the 17th century was marked by an exploration of human emotions and a blossoming of vocal expressiveness. Performing some of the gems from these repertoires, the solists of the Maitrise de Notre-Dame celebrate the diversity of musical languages.

Haydn's Creation brought the 18th century to a glorious close and laid the foundations for what would become the oratorio in the 19th century. Performed more than forty times throughout Europe before the composer's death in 1809, it remains unanimously admired for the mastery of its vocal and orchestral writing and the power of its expressiveness.