Bestia is a 23-minute concerto for trumpet and orchestra, written for Austrian soloist Selina Ott and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and The Florida Orchestra.
The work was premiered at the Barbican on 24 April 2026 by Ott and the BBCSO, conducted by Fabien Gabel, as part of the orchestra’s ‘Making America’ series. Further performances follow in 2027 with Ott and the Banatul Philharmonic under Lawrence Foster in Timișoara, and with The Florida Orchestra for the US premiere.
Programme
Bernard Herrmann
Suite from ‘Vertigo’
Ryan Latimer
Bestia: Concerto for Trumpet & Orchestra
BBC Co-Commission and World Premiere
Terence Blanchard
Suite from ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
The Sea Hawk
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 ‘In Concert’ on 29 April 2026
About the Work
Bestia is a multi-movement concerto for trumpet and orchestra. Inspired by John Henry Fleming’s modern-day bestiary Fearsome Creatures of Florida, it inhabits a world where real and imagined creatures coexist, many transformed by their environments and by human interference, the solo trumpet cast as its central shape-shifting protagonist.
The opening movement centres on the Storm Devils: suburban creatures that appear ordinary until lightning storms transform them into boisterous, destructive beasts. Flitting, scurrying textures and lyrical trumpet lines give way to music of mounting force. The second movement features the piccolo trumpet in a tribute to Gordo, the squirrel monkey launched into space from Cape Canaveral in 1958, whose capsule was never recovered. Chattering figures emerge from surging orchestral swells before softening into a haunting, elegiac close.
The third movement erupts in pummelling, gnashing exchanges, the trumpet driving a volatile orchestral landscape reflecting the vicious creatures hardened by the industrial hazards of Florida’s citrus groves. The finale turns to Gilda, an escaped circus elephant whose fleeting appearance gradually passes into memory and myth. As certainty gives way to ambiguity, the concerto dissolves into an ending of quiet mystery.
