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On the final day of Spitalfields Winter Festival, Solomon's Knot performed Bach's Mass in B minor with a wonderful sense of community which we the audience also shared.

The Sixteen and Opera North Children’s Chorus close Spitalfields Music Winter Festival in sparkling fashion with Poulenc and Britten.

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.

Innovative and clever, inspired by a mixture of personal memories, philosophical readings and tragic myth, Remember Me feels more like performance art than opera, moving slowly towards a sudden, secret ending.

December in London doesn’t just mean wall-to-wall carol singing and the Messiah. It also means Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, which can be relied upon to programme something novel for the festive season while still not skimping on the mince pies.

Reading Gérard Grisey’s programme notes on his masterpiece Vortex Temporum is not the most agreeable experience. The reader is informed that the work is structured around ‘three basic forms’: ‘the original event – a sinusoidal wave – and two continuous events, an attack with or without resonance as well as a sound held with or without crescendo’.

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.

Claudio Monteverdi spent a great deal of his career writing madrigals, of which he published nine books. The Italian ensemble La Venexiana treated us to a baker's dozen of his later madrigals, mainly drawn from books six to eight, in the elegant surroundings of Christ Church in Spitalfields.