From the Jungle to the Star Trio and the Fires of Hell – my pick for new music coming to concerts this year | music

TThree heatwaves, but summer doesn’t really start until the Proms start, and on Friday, Radio 3 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra lit up the blue touch sheet for eight weeks of music-making at the Royal Albert Hall and beyond. Like me, you may have looked through our Prom Guide to identify the concerts you want to hear most, but what always surprises us as the summer of music unfolds are the concerts that we couldn’t have predicted would be great; Concerts that may seem unexceptional on paper but in the body of performance find a special resonance, whether that’s debuting groups, brand new music and concert premieres, or simply that chemistry that means concerts days or weeks apart create musical and creative connections you never thought possible.

Predicting the surprises and discoveries of a season that has not yet begun is of course futile and contradictory, but among the new music on offer there are many works that deserve their own mark of the pen. The world premiere of Josephine Stevenson’s First Night’s That Sunrise Leaves Us No Unmoved, and Jesse Montgomery’s Cello Concerto for Abel Silaucco’s These Righteous Paths, on July 20, should form a wonderfully contrasting duo – Stevenson has written music of poetic refinement while the collaboration between Montgomery and Silaucco’s concertos promises to experience the power of soul-searching. “A living organism that gradually absorbs orchestra and audience alike into its breathing body,” Michelle Assay wrote at the work’s North American premiere in Toronto.

And I wouldn’t miss seeing two very different orchestras opening concerts a few days apart: György Kurtag’s Stele, conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony on 22 July, and Norwegian composer Christine Tjogersen’s Among the Trees, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner on 27 July.

Stele’s three short, shattering movements are a layered tapestry of personal, musical and historical lament. This piece, composed for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1994, is a vision “of someone lying wounded on the battlefield. The fighting rages around him, but he sees only a very clear, very blue sky… His feeling is that nothing is as important as this sky,” Kurtag said. Written in memory of his friend, the composer and teacher András Mihalyi, the work begins with an allusion to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio: the octaves symbolizing Florestan’s imprisonment and his hope. But Kurtag’s piece offers no version. That blue sky remains elusive in the Larghissimo-Adagio’s first movement, and especially in the explosion of despair in the second part, where the gigantic orchestra is consumed with a stubborn, devastating struggle, before a final movement that represents a muffled march toward oblivion, a static state of purgatory desolation.

Meanwhile, Tjøgersen’s book Among the Trees, written in 2021, is a Nordic vision of hope and the worship of nature. Produced with as much forensic attention to image and orchestral idea as Kurtag’s piece, Tjoersen’s inspiration was to take her listeners “on a sonic journey,” an orchestral journey that, she says, “gives the audience the feeling of being inside the forest rather than viewing it from a distance.” Her work begins with her representation of the sounds of squirrels eating nuts, and is inspired by the innate connections through which trees communicate and communicate. You’ll hear the birdsong of cuckoos, owls and magpies, as well as an ancient orchestral depiction of pastoral harmony: a quartet of trumpets, and a solo oboe.

And beyond the antiseptic and pastoral harmonies, there are more new musical resonances with the first performances of not only the season’s triple concertos: Edith Canat de Cesi’s Skyline, for three percussionists and timpani on 18 August, and two weeks later on 6 September, there is Gwilym Simcock’s concerto for an all-star trio of BBC Young Musician of the Year alumni and saxophonist. Jess Gillam, trumpeter Ben Goldscheider, and cellist Chico Kanneh-Mason. Among those pieces is another distinguished world premiere from Thea Musgrave, her Bassoon Concerto Out of the Darkness, composed by Amy Harman, on August 23.

And there are two parts of Thomas Adès’s Dante to look forward to, with the composer himself conducting the National Youth Orchestra in Purgatorio (8 August), and Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Phil in Inferno a few days later; LA Phil is also playing the UK premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s powerful Revolución Diamantina.

Twenty-first-century music aside, my top picks for the season finale are the Jupiter Ensemble with lutenist Thomas Dunford at Dowland and Purcell on July 21, and on the penultimate night, the Mahler Academy Orchestra plays instruments known by Mahler and commissioned by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Their recording of the Ninth Symphony is a real discovery: I can’t wait to hear them live.

Summer starts here – and hopefully the air conditioning in the Royal Albert Hall is ready, otherwise you’ll be hearing the sounds of fusion machines as well as Radio 3 announcers. Good luck studio!

IInspired by a rewatch of Julia Davis’ Nighty Night, the darkest and funniest TV comedy of all time – fight me! – and her monstrous creation, Jill, whose reign of terror devours Cath and Dawn and everyone else she touches. I’ve been listening to Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for My Name Is Someone, whose hilarious and surreal theme song is also the theme to Nighty Night. Morricone was in fine form in this picture, sending up Wagner’s flight of Valkyries in The Wild Horde, and writing one of the great themes of world-weary complacency in Good Luck, Jack. And these are just the first three signs!