No rest for BPO! Fresh from a packed December touring our sell-out A Christmas Carol, we launched into 2026 with a month of talks, workshops and educational outreach.
At the heart of all this activity was our January concert, The Draughtsman’s Contract. The programme paired Wynton Marsalis’ striking new trumpet concerto – performed by rising star Aaron Azunda Akugbo – with suites from two iconic Michael Nyman film scores.
Activity got underway on Friday 9 Jan, when Aaron joined Brighton & East Sussex Youth Orchestra at rehearsal to work with their young musicians. Part of BPO’s ongoing collaboration with Create Music, Sussex’s lead music hub, the evening included brass sectionals and an in-depth Q&A. Inspired players were then able to see Aaron in action at Brighton Dome, with complimentary tickets courtesy of Travelbound – the travel company behind Create Music’s forthcoming summer tour and a sponsor of BPO.
Born in 1998, Aaron started the trumpet at age four, attended music school from the age of eight and went on to graduate from the Royal Academy of Music. By 25, he was performing Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall.
Yet despite his early entry into the music world, Aaron doesn’t come from a musical family.
‘I didn’t have my parents pressuring me to practice,” he told BESYO’s young musicians in their Q&A session. “I played because I wanted to. At the start, I was influenced more by jazz than classical. My parents listened to jazz and my next-door neighbour liked giving me jazz CDs.
“I grew to love classical as I got older and my tastes shifted, particularly influenced by music school. I love blurring the discipline of classical music with the fun of jazz. It shouldn’t feel like ‘these are the notes on the page, and you have to play them exactly as written.’”
“We don’t know what Tchaikovsky wanted,” agreed BESYO Conductor Peter Davison, referring to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6: the focus of their rehearsal that evening. Just a few minutes earlier, Aaron had been playing the symphony side-by-side with the young musicians in their brass sectional.
A player asked Aaron how he copes with performance anxiety before a major concert like the Proms. His answer: visualisation.
“I play it all out in my head so I know how it’s going to go. I was thinking: ‘ok, so I’ll walk onstage here, and the audience will be standing there, and the camera will be there… And the Haydn is only 15 minutes – that’s the length of time I sing in the shower… There’s so many ways you can normalise it, rather than letting it build into something super scary.”
At six movements – 35 minutes – the trumpet concerto he performed with BPO was a different challenge.
“My ‘singing in the shower’ visualisation won’t work there,” he joked. “Unless I make my showers longer!”
In January’s concert, the trumpet concerto was paired with suites from two film scores: Michael Nyman’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Prospero’s Books (1991).
Film music formed another strand of our January activity. BPO members recently had the chance to dive deeper into The Draughtsman’s Contract with a talk from Mary Jane Walsh. A key figure in the film’s production, she shared behind-the-scenes anecdotes, photos, and even a costume or two, illustrated musically by BPO’s Artistic Director Joanna MacGregor at the piano.
The film takes place in an exaggerated, stylised 1694, complete with billowing New Romantic shirts and sky-high wigs. Nyman’s score mirrors its baroque swagger with fresh, punchy reworkings of Henry Purcell: 17th-century grounds become pounding, rock-and-roll bass lines.
‘It sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis,’ Joanna joked after playing an extract, ‘but I promise you it’s all Purcell.’
Nyman’s music also provided the basis of our education projects this month. We worked with film music historian, composer, pianist and TV presenter Neil Brand to deliver sessions to GCSE and A-Level pupils. Taking place in four schools across the city – King’s School Hove, Patcham High, Cardinal Newman, and Blatchington Mill – students explored how film music is composed and how it relates to a screenplay and its narrative.
Neil used excerpts from the two Nyman scores as working examples, which students then experienced in concert with complimentary tickets courtesy of Travelbound.
Travelbound’s Head of Music and Concert Tours, Ilaria Roche, commented: ‘We’re delighted to support the BPO’s education outreach. Our tours enable children to broaden their horizons, performing music on tour across the UK and overseas. But that passion for performance starts at home, and we’re thrilled to be supporting young people to experience live orchestral music on their doorstep here in our hometown of Brighton.’
