This programme explores the music young aristocrats might have heard in Italian cities, and on the long and arduous route through Germany and across the Alps. It includes sonatas, dances and variations by Castello, Bertoli, Frescobaldi, Rosenmüller, Böddecker and others, and features the rarely-heard virtuoso repertory for the dulcian, the predecessor of the Baroque bassooon.

This year the Christmas concert surveys music for the Christmas season from Advent to Epiphany, featuring work by J. S. Bach, Buxtehude, Schütz, Tunder, Bernard, Schmelzer, Biber and others.

In this dazzling new programme, trumpet sonatas and concertos by Torelli, Stradella, Manfredini and Vivaldi are contrasted with intense works for four-part strings by Cazzati, Legrenzi and Alessandro Scarlatti.

Bach’s St Matthew Passion is one of the great masterpieces of Western music. This performance, with a distinguished cast of soloists, is a rare chance to hear the work complete and in German using the sort of forces Bach envisaged. We believe it is the first British performance of the work as conceived around 1725.