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Part of this year's London Handel Festival, Apollo e Dafne and The Choice of Hercules are transported to the stage in a captivating production that blends music and dance.

Terrific music making with a light directorial touch brings mixed results to Monteverdi's 1643 masterpiece. 

Handel’s opera Orlando is famous for the great mad scene at the end of Act 2. Specifically written for the celebrated castrato Senesino, it’s an emotionally powerful ten-minute monologue.

Despite the beautiful sensitivity of La Nuova Musica, coupled with some truly sublime singing, the silliness of Cavalli’s opera is sometimes overplayed in this semi-staged production; less is, sometimes, more.

A strong cast and fine playing from La Nuova Musica gives Handel's Berenice a reasonably fair outing, but its original plot weaknesses constrain this opera from being anything more than a curio for the Handel connoisseur. 

A very naughty translation and some fine singing make for a delightfully comic evening of Cesti's recently rediscovered Orontea at Wigmore Hall. 

Lucy Crowe and Tim Mead give a thoughtful rendition of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater at a Lenten concert by La Nuova Musica at St John's Smith Square.

As part of Spitalfields Winter Festival, Lawrence Zazzo and La Nuova Musica presented a beautifully curated programme of operatic gems by Handel and his lesser-known contemporaries Bononcini and Ariosti.

I’ve had the great privilege and even greater joy over the last couple of months to have been totally immersed in Bach: I’ve been researching him, and particularly his Passions, since Christmas.

Classical music is not cool. Most people who’ve come through secondary school with a love for it are well aware of that, having been frequently reminded of it by their peers. As a result of this, most of us probably couldn’t care less, though I’m sure we all question, when beholding some particularly awesome musical event, the premises on which this schoolyard assumption is based.