AAM has announced our 2025-26 season across London and Cambridge. The 2025–26 season sees AAM revive lost voices, reimagine classics, and span centuries in music that has never felt more alive.
Music Director Laurence Cummings comments: It is my great pleasure to announce AAM’s 2025-26 season, in which the orchestra takes on its first ‘new look’ since it was founded in 1973. To reflect this milestone, our programming is taking a similarly fresh approach, reconsidering ‘great works’ of the canon, reintroducing music previously lost to history, and rethinking how we present it all to modern concertgoers. We have been challenging pre-conceived notions and thrilling audiences the world over for more than 50 years. This season we continue to feature our outstanding musicians who breathe new life into this ‘ancient’ music.
The 2025-26 Season
AAM opens the 2025-26 season with Haydn in Paris. AAM Music Director Laurence Cummings directs a glittering evocation of 1780s Paris, with showpieces by Mozart and the pioneering Chevalier de Saint-Georges alongside Haydn’s majestic Symphony No.82, The Bear (12 & 14 Nov).
AAM’s ever-popular Messiah returns for the festive season (15 Dec), with Cummings at the helm and all-star soloists: soprano Nardus Williams, alto Reginald Mobley, tenor Thomas Walker and bass Ashley Riches.
Monteverdi’s daring Madrigals of Love and War take centre stage (11 & 12 Feb) with soprano Anna Dennis and tenor Ed Lyon. In March, AAM Leader Bojan Čičić uncovers the remarkable legacy of Elisabetta da Gambarini – the first woman to publish music in England – in English Impresaria (11 & 12 Mar), featuring rarely heard works by Gambarini, Handel and Geminiani with soprano Mhairi Lawson.
In The Chosen One (14 & 16 Apr), Laurence Cummings conducts a reimagining of the 1723 Leipzig audition that famously saw J.S. Bach take up the post of Thomaskantor, alongside works by Telemann and Graupner, with soloists Helen Charlston, Nick Pritchard and Ben Kazez. In May, AAM joins marimba virtuoso Christoph Sietzen and The Wave Quartet for Rhythm Across Time (13 & 14 May), an electrifying sequence of music from Festa to Xenakis, daringly reimagined for marimbas and strings.
The season concludes in splendour with a concert performance of Handel’s Serse (19 Jun), a tale of love, loyalty and longing in ancient Persia featuring a cast of leading Handel interpreters including Paula Murrihy, Louise Alder, Rachel Redmond, Rebecca Leggett, Claudia Huckle, Luca Tittoto, and Thomas Chenhall.