NYOS Announces 2025 Orchestra Programmes

Groundbreaking symphonies, grand Shakespearean settings, dynamic 21st-century works, and a new commission from Jay Capperauld all feature in a jam-packed season with performances across Scotland and beyond.  

After another terrific year of concerts in 2024, which culminated in the world premiere of a new concerto for piano trio and orchestra by Andrea Tarrodi, NYOS returns in 2025 with another season exploring thrilling, and challenging, orchestral repertoire from the past 300 years.   

NYOS, Scotland’s national youth orchestra, will once again give the world premiere of a new concerto, commissioned by NYOS from Jay Capperauld, one of Scotland’s most exciting young composers. BBC New Generation Artist, Ryan Corbett, will appear as soloist in this innovative, and macabre, new work for accordion and orchestra, inspired by the eccentric experiments of 18th-century Italian physician Luigi Galvani, an inspiration for Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein.  

After the premiere in Perth, the orchestra will perform internationally for the first time in 10 years, attending the Young Euro Classic festival in Berlin in Summer 2025 with an intoxicating and fantastical programme completed by Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, conducted by NYOS Music Director Catherine Larsen-Maguire.  

In spring, Jac van Steen, Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster and Prague Symphony Orchestras, will return to conduct NYOS, following his brilliant work with the orchestra in 2022. The programme is centred around some of the greatest orchestral responses to literature ever written, including Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Elgar’s Falstaff, in the composer’s mind his greatest work, and Alma Mahler’s Sieben Lieder, in which we will be joined by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer Award.  

Catherine Larsen-Maguire will conduct the NYOS Development Orchestra for the first time in spring 2025. The programme features beautiful orchestral depictions of landscapes from Bohemia to Sussex by Smetana and Avril Coleridge Taylor, Daniel Kidane’s grime-inspired Breakbeat and Oscar Navarro’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1. We are joined in the concerto by NYOS alumni Adam Lee, a member of the orchestra as recently as 2021 and now Principal Clarinet No. 2 of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, amongst many other solo and orchestral engagements. 

In summer, NYOS Development will be conducted by Natalia Luis Bassa, who has been working with the orchestra since its inception in 2023. Once again, the orchestra will perform an entire symphony, an impressive feat for players of this age. Following a fantastic performance of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony in 2023, this time they will perform Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. Despite some early negative press, with initial reactions ranging from ‘semi-barbaric’ to ‘twaddle’, the work is now one of the most enduring and frequently performed symphonies from the late 19th century. Alongside the symphony, the orchestra will perform the first movement of Finnish composer Ida Moberg’s orchestral suite, Sunrise.  

A full list of dates for all our performances can be found on our website here. 

Tickets for these NYOS concerts will go on sale in 2025.