Bpo Listening Club: Harmonium (Beethoven And The Sussex Landscape)

Joanna MacGregor is taking over the Brighton Unitarian Church on Thursday 14 January 2027 for Harmonium (Beethoven And The Sussex Landscape), an illustrated talk that sits within the BPO Listening Club series. It's a one-hour session, and as the title suggests, the focus is on Beethoven and the Sussex landscape.

If you're not familiar with the Listening Club, it's a series of informal talks MacGregor leads throughout the BPO's concert season. The idea is simple: she takes the music the orchestra is playing and dives deeper into it, pulling back the curtain on what's actually happening. She talks through the composers' intentions, the social context the music came from, and the specific musical motifs to listen out for, all in a format designed to illuminate and entertain rather than lecture. It's the kind of thing that makes the actual concert feel a bit more vivid once you've heard the story behind it.

This particular session, Harmonium, focuses on Beethoven and the Sussex landscape, so expect the talk to lean into the connection between the music and the local scenery. MacGregor's approach is to give you the tools to hear the music more clearly, so if you've ever sat through a classical piece and wondered why it's moving the way it is, this is exactly the sort of thing that fills in those gaps.

It runs for an hour, and the standard ticket is £10. It starts at 18:00 at the Brighton Unitarian Church on New Road, BN1 1UF, so it's an early evening one in the centre of town.