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Who needs a conductor? The OAE under the direction of Matthew Truscott reveal the delightful range and character of Haydn, from his symphonic beginnings to the very end.

Fantasias for viol trio performed by members of Phantasm illustrate the inventiveness of England's best composers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Since reading Stravinsky’s assertion (in Poetics of Music) that “The more constraint one imposes, the more one frees oneself from the chains that shackle the spirit”, this paradox has fascinated me.

Short, but nonetheless entertaining, the lunchtime series at St George’s, Bristol put on a show with the final of their Hidden Haydn concerts. The programme was designed to explore the lost and less frequently played works of Franz Joseph Haydn (1832-1809), with a couple of treats from less well-known composers thrown in.

Entitled “Monteverdi, Opera and Beyond”, lyric tenor and baroque specialist Paul Agnew devised a 90 minute programme exploring the role of recitative in Monteverdi’s opera and its influence on seventeenth-century English and French operatic music.