This programme brings together popular works such as ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway’ (the Bell Anthem) and ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’ (featuring Adrian Peacock as Charles II’s ‘stupendious’ bass John Gostling) with some lesser-known masterpieces. The programme also includes two of Purcell finest dramatic sacred songs, ‘The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation’ and ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor’.

John Dowland virtually invented the English lute song, often achieving a perfect balance between the words and the music. This programme includes some of his greatest songs, including the melancholy masterpiece ‘In darkness let me dwell’, as well songs and lute pieces by his contemporaries and followers.

Opera Restor’d’s innovative new programme traces the ups and downs of love from youth to extreme old age. Songs and dialogues are woven into a fully-staged dramatic tableau that takes the two characters and the audience from first love and romantic passion to bleak despair, with plenty of irony and humour.

This programme brings together the popular Music for the Royal Fireworks, written for a firework display in Green Park in 1749, with two of the rarely-heard Concerti a due cori, scored for two antiphonal wind bands with strings. It will also include the brilliant overture to The Occasional Oratorio (1746), scored for three trumpets and timpani with orchestra, and the ‘Concerto for Trumpets and Horns’ a fascinating early version of the Fireworks Music.

A pre-concert talk by Bridget Crowley of the National Gallery.

This fascinating and acclaimed programme creates a ‘sound picture’ of one of Holbein’s greatest and most enigmatic paintings. Music by Henry VIII, William Cornysh, Antoine Busnois, Josquin des Pres and others.

This programme collects together many favourite ‘national songs’, in their rarely-heard original versions, including Purcell’s ‘Fairest isle’ and Thomas Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’.