BBC Philharmonic Plans Leadership Handover to Weilerstein

The BBC Philharmonic has chosen Joshua Weilerstein as its next chief conductor, setting up a transition whose timing is already unusually clear. John Storgårds continues in the job until September 2028, while the incoming conductor completes other commitments.

Weilerstein is music director of the Orchestre National de Lille and is expected to end his period as chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra after the 2027–28 season. His Manchester appointment therefore sits alongside a planned shift in his working calendar rather than causing an immediate change to the BBC orchestra’s current concerts.

The choice is grounded in performances together. At the 2025 BBC Proms, Weilerstein conducted a programme that ranged from Copland and Artie Shaw to Elsa Barraine’s Second Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. In Manchester in April 2026 he returned with Ellington’s Harlem, Kapustin’s Fourth Piano Concerto, played by Frank Dupree, and Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

Such programmes show a willingness to put American, Russian and French works into conversation. They should not, however, be mistaken for an announcement of the incoming chief’s first season. The orchestra’s next repertory choices remain to be disclosed.

Weilerstein studied violin and conducting at New England Conservatory and won the 2009 Malko Competition. Outside live performance he has developed the Sticky Notes podcast, launched in 2017, as a way of talking audiences through orchestral music.

For the BBC Philharmonic, the news provides a named successor while preserving the remainder of Storgårds’s term. The interval gives musicians and management space to plan programming and build on an existing musical relationship before the title formally changes hands.