The London Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO), considered one of the finest youth orchestras in the world, returns with a vivid new programme inspired by the sea.

Enyi Okpara will then take to the podium for John Pickard's Sea-Change - a work written for ambitious young musicians, drawing out subtler shifts in mood and colour. Anna Clyne's Restless Oceans follows on, a piece of contemporary defiance inspired by Audre Lorde's poem "A Woman Speaks", in which the musicians are called on to sing and stamp their feet as well as play, standing united. The evening turns to legend with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a shimmering orchestral retelling of Sinbad's voyages across the Arabian seas. 

Moving through turbulence and triumph to defiance and myth, this is a programme that mirrors the sea itself, charting a journey between classical and contemporary stories - from the crash of Smyth's shipwreck drama, through Pickard's shifting tides and Clyne's restless waters, to the swell and sweeping waves of Rimsky-Korsakov's Arabian voyage. 

John Pickard - Sea-change
Anna Clyne - Restless Oceans*
Rimsky Korsakov - Scheherazade

London Schools Symphony Orchestra

Enyi Okpara, Conductor
Sitali Dewan, Conductor-In-Residence*