The folk-like style of Joseph Haydn’s charming Missa Sancti Nicolai seems intended to evoke the music of the shepherds in the Christmas story. In this programme the mass movements are surrounded by other music, as they would have been at the time. The delightful D major horn concerto by Johann Michael Haydn, Joseph’s younger brother, is played during the Communion. The programme is completed by Joseph Haydn’s Cantilena pro Adventu, an Advent aria in operatic style, and several choral pastorellas, written in the same rustic Christmas style as the Mass.

In this programme Trevor Pinnock plays a selection of some of the greatest music written for the harpsichord by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and French composers.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Magnificat is one of his finest and most popular religious works. The concert includes three mature festive cantatas that also use a large orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani. The ‘Ascension Oratorio’ ‘Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen’, performed on 19 May 1735, is notable for its concerto-like first chorus and the aria ‘Ach, bleibe doch’, the first version of the Agnus Dei of the B minor Mass. The Whitsun cantata ‘O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe’ begins with one of Bach’s greatest and most complex choruses.