Upcoming Events

‘Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate’ sings Dido at the end of Purcell’s opera. But life isn’t always quite so straightforward, and some memories have a destiny of their own. Set several years after the Carthaginian queen’s death, Dido’s Ghost finds Dido’s sister Anna abandoned on the shores of Aeneas’s new kingdom, igniting a murderous jealously in Aeneas’s wife Lavinia – and as events play out, its characters confront a past that refuses to fade. Co-commissioned by Dunedin Consort, the Barbican Centre, Buxton International Festival, Edinburgh International…

‘Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate’ sings Dido at the end of Purcell’s opera. But life isn’t always quite so straightforward, and some memories have a destiny of their own. Set several years after the Carthaginian queen’s death, Dido’s Ghost finds Dido’s sister Anna abandoned on the shores of Aeneas’s new kingdom, igniting a murderous jealously in Aeneas’s wife Lavinia – and as events play out, its characters confront a past that refuses to fade. Co-commissioned by Dunedin Consort, the Barbican Centre, Buxton International Festival, Edinburgh International…

‘Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate’ sings Dido at the end of Purcell’s opera. But life isn’t always quite so straightforward, and some memories have a destiny of their own. Set several years after the Carthaginian queen’s death, Dido’s Ghost finds Dido’s sister Anna abandoned on the shores of Aeneas’s new kingdom, igniting a murderous jealously in Aeneas’s wife Lavinia – and as events play out, its characters confront a past that refuses to fade. Co-commissioned by Dunedin Consort, the Barbican Centre, Buxton International Festival, Edinburgh International…

Join us for a celebratory evening of royal odes by Handel and Purcell — resplendent in pomp and glory!

Join us for a celebratory evening of royal odes by Handel and Purcell — resplendent in pomp and glory!

When in 1785 the Wiener Tonkünstlersozietät, a pension fund for the widows and orphans of professional musicians, asked Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for a choral work for their benefit concerts, the composer used a trick that was quite common at the time: he placed the Kyrie and Gloria of his unfinished mass in c -Moll with additionally composed arias and an underlaid Italian text for the cantata "Davide penitente" (The penitent David). It is possible that Mozart induced a reform of Emperor…

With its large polyphonic choirs and its long virtuosic solo arias, the Great Mass in C minor, written in 1782, surpassed Mozart’s earlier sacred compositions in scope. Nowadays it is considered one of the greatest mass settings in the history of European music, even though it remained unfinished, like the composer’s requiem. There is still a good deal of speculation as to why this is, but Mozart later reused large parts of the music in his cantata “Davide penitente”. Rather…