Heinrich Biber and Georg Muffat, the greatest Austrian composers of the seventeenth century, were colleagues at the Salzburg court in the 1680s with sharply contrasted outlooks.

Beethoven’s youthful Op. 17 sonata is placed in the context of works by his contemporaries and followers: a solo by Antonin Reicha (1770 – 1836) and a sonata by the precocious, short- lived Nikolaus von Krufft (1779 -1818).

Boyce’s Peleus and Thetis, and Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe, are performed by Opera Restor’d.

A pre-concert talk by Professor Philip Wilby, University of Leeds

The mass is usually performed today as a torso, but Philip Wilby has reconstructed the entire work, using extra numbers Mozart added to Davidde penitente which may originally have been conceived for the uncompleted mass. Thus it is now possible to hear the mass for the first time in a complete form as the composer intended. In this performance we intersperse the movements of the mass with an Epistle sonata, an Offertory motet and a Communion motet, as in Salzburg practice of the period.

Bach’s unaccompanied suites are the greatest works written for the cello in the Baroque period, and the corner ones of the instrument’s modern repertory. In this informal recital Sebastian Comberti introduces complete performances of Suites Nos 1 and 2, bwv 1007 and 1008, and contrasts them with un-accompanied Italian Baroque cello music.

A century of Austrian concertos or concerto- like works, ranging from Biber’s Battaglia à 10 (1673) , an extraordinary evocation of seventeenth-century warfare scored for nine-part rings with solo violin, to Mozart’s virtuoso motet ‘Exsultate jubilate’, K. 165 (1773), a vocal concerto in all but name.