En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Clare Wilkinson

Bach's St John Passion thrills the audience at Valletta International Baroque Festival. 

Polyphony live up to their reputation, performing Bach's St John Passion with intensity and dynamism, in a performance only marred by some routine orchestral playing. 

Passion is not for the faint-hearted. This performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion weighed in at three hours (excluding interval). However, my attention did not waver, and this seemed true of the rest of enraptured audience.

Who better to direct an all-Haydn programme than Adam Fischer? Co-founder of the Haydn Festival, he also founded the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, who recorded the composer’s entire symphonic output in Haydn Hall of the Esterházy Palace, Eisenstadt, Haydn’s former place of employment.

The scene is 1612 in Venice: a great battle has been won against the dreaded Ottoman Empire, and in celebration, evening prayers are ordered to be set to music specially composed by the great Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi and others.

The Dunedin Consort are, as I write, engaged in recording Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. On the eve of this undertaking, they presented the third and final part of their Brandenburg/Cantata series. The format of paired concerto and cantata in either half contained a novelty: this was the first time I'd heard the consort play a composer other than Bach.

There's nothing like a Brandenburg to blow away Christmas cobwebs. Alongside contrasting cantatas, the Dunedin Consort offered the 3rd and 5th from Bach's 1721 set of six concerti grossi. This made for a compact and nicely balanced programme, contrasting the sacred with the secular and vocal with purely instrumental timbres.