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A semi-staged Dido from the Academy of Ancient Music and the speculative funeral music for a queen.

Superlative musicianship and extravagant detailing from the force-of-nature that is Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music 

Sublime orchestral playing and stellar soloists don't quite make up for a lacklustre performance by the Academy's choir in Monteverdi's moving work

Eschewing conventions throughout, Daisy Evans' production of The Fairy Queen walks boldly out of the woods into an exciting future for opera staging.

Richard Egarr leads the Academy of Ancient Music and a stellar team of vocal soloists in an unapologetically lush and dramatic St Matthew Passion.

Billed as a “concert hall staging”, the Academy of Ancient Music’s season-opening performance of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was brilliantly staged at the Barbican by the director Orpha Phelan and designer Caroline Hughes – as close as one could get to a full production in a concert hall without a pit.

How’s this for an original way of displaying one’s celebratory Union Flag? Strapped to the top of one’s contrabassoon! Apart from the absence of the National Anthem and horseracing, this concert gave us the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee weekend in a nutshell, encompassing the solemnity and sovereignty of all four of Handel’s Coronation Anthems, the exuberance of the Music for the Royal Firework