A Fantasy Team of Baroque Composers Imagine picking all the best bits of your favourite pop, rock, hip-hop, and jazz stars and combining them into one fantastical package, a bit like your fantasy football team. How great would that be? Each brings their own strengths to the party and creates a world-beating combination. The French players (Leclair, Lully, Rameau, Couperin) …

There are plenty of mysteries out there in the musical world: the two heads inside Haydn’s tomb, the enigma behind Elgar’s variations. But what of the gruesome murder of poor Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764)? From lace-maker, to dancing star and violin virtuoso, everything seemed to be going right for Leclair. Celebrated as the ‘French Corelli’, his compositions quickly drew the attention …

It’s the mother of all bad hair days for Scylla in Leclair’s only opera. Based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scylla is just a nymph going about her business. Not especially interested in love, she rejects the advances of shepherds and anyone else that thinks they’re in with a shot of winning her heart. When sea-god Glaucus tries the same thing she’s …

Secret agent, prisoner, playwright and poet. Clearly there was never a dull moment in the life of this 17th century International Woman of Mystery. While her blood-thirsty play Abdelazer attracts our attention because of the music that Purcell composed for it, the rest of her life seems equally adventurous. As a spy (codename: Astrea) for Charles II in the second …

Benjamin Britten’s (1913-1976) extraordinary piece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra has been a favourite of education schemes and family orchestral concerts for years. Britten pinched one of Henry Purcell’s (1659-1695) themes and used it to explore the sections of the huge modern symphony orchestra in an imaginative series of variations. With each variation highlighting the colours, styles and …

With just hours to go, the Big Give Christmas Challenge 2018 goes live at midday tomorrow (27th November). Past appeals have always featured exciting new enterprises such as our staged Messiah or collaboration with New English Ballet Theatre and this year we are equally ambitious as we seek to raise £40,000 towards our new creation Dido & Aeneas: The Untold …