Handel’s Fireworks Music, written for a celebration in Green Park in 1749 to mark the Peace of Aix la Chapelle, is an appropriate choice for a concert during the Bonfire Night weekend. The sparkling and delicate Water Music suite is an excellent foil to the Fireworks Music. The programme is completed by Handel’s Concerto Grosso in A minor.

The Christmas Story is one of the masterpieces of Heinrich Schütz’s old age. The first half of the concert is an anthology of seasonal music by Schütz’s German contemporaries, including settings of Lutheran chorales by Michael Praetorius and Samuel Scheidt for divided choirs of voices and instruments, a virtuoso duet by Schütz’s friend Johann Hermann Schein, and instrumental canzonas for cornetts, trombones, dulcian, strings and organ by Schütz’s teacher Giovanni Gabrieli.

Brahms’s Trio in E flat, op. 40 for horn, violin and piano, is one of the last great works for the natural horn, memorably evoking nature and the hunt. There will also be a delightful trio by Heinrich Herzogenberg (1843-1900), an Austrian friend and follower of Brahms, and violin and horn solos by Schubert and Schumann.

This is the first solo lute recital SVF has promoted, and it is fitting that it is given by Fred Jacobs, one of Europe’s most prominent lutenists. In this programme, he uses a ten-course lute to play early seventeenth-century music by John Dowland and his contemporaries.

Handel’s oratorio Susanna, composed in 1748 and performed the following year, is one of his freshest and most delightful works, described by the scholar Winton Dean as ‘an opera of village life, and a comic opera at that’.