Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Bacchanale premiered with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on 4 December at Glasgow’s City Halls, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the 12-minute work featured as part of the BBC SSO’s 90th birthday celebration concert. It will make its German debut on 25 January 2026 in Cologne conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada. Listen to the broadcast here.
Bacchanale, as the title suggests, is filled with the spirit of celebration – specifically the Caribbean carnival. It begins with rushes of string glissandi, snap pizzicatos, and energetic rhythmic outbursts from piano, harp, and two percussionists, before a more lyrical central section, before reigniting as the coda approaches.
We got a blast of Caribbean sunshine…full of rhythmic swagger, percussive energy and defiantly upbeat melodies…a tribute to the orchestra’s vital role in championing new music in Scotland, as well as a marvellous antidote to a freezing Glasgow winter’s night.
The Times (Martin Shields) 10 December 2025 ****
Latin American rhythms pulsed as a carnival procession moved. I could almost see the parade and taste the tropical fruits and the rum. Brass and percussion drove the syncopated rhythms and the momentum, while strings and winds were the onlookers joyously caught up in the explosion of colour, rhythm and movement…A thrilling, upbeat, life-affirming concert opener captured the hearts of the Glasgow audience.
Edinburgh Music Review (Donal Hurley) 10 December 2025
Following the premiere of Bacchanale, Witter-Johnson performed her Windrush Reflections as part of a set at Glasgow’s Fruitmarket with members of the orchestra. The 15-minute work for chamber ensemble of bass clarinet, harp, and string quartet is cast three movements – ‘Mango Dreams’, ‘Motherland Calling’, and ‘A New Land’ – that refracts Witter-Johnson’s rich Jamaican musical and cultural heritage, with a pervasive groove. Witter-Johnson returns to Scotland in April to perform a set of her own compositions and Scottish jazz legends with members of the BBC SSO and jazz pianist Fergus McCreadie.
On 29 November Chineke! Orchestra celebrated their first ten years in a special gala concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall featuring Witter-Johnson’s Blush for chamber orchestra, a work they commissioned for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2021. The 10-minute work, which has been performed by the Ulster Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Sinfonia Smith Square, and choreographed in Florida, imagines the sound world experienced by a young Caribbean woman in the early part of the twentieth century attending her first dance; the work’s rhythms are inspired, as in many of her pieces, by Mento music – the early Jamaican folk tradition that blends African and European musical ideas.