Venue: Christ Church, Spitalfields, London

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

The decision to appoint the Early Opera Company and Scanner as this year’s associate artists says much about Spitalfields Music Summer Festival, an eclectic cornucopia of classical and non-classical music concerts by professional and amateur artists, bespoke tours, and family activities.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, the humming and buzzing of post-work Friday-night drinkers lining the sun-kissed streets of Spitalfields, who’d have thought that in the church at the very heart of that lively London area would be a man, standing alone, singing music written 800 years ago? Music from another human-inhabited world, so alien to our modern-day, Commercial Street lives, and yet still

The Sixteen’s three appearances in the line-up for this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival showcase the breadth of their repertoire. On June 15 and 16, they will premiere Alan Roth’s new musical setting of Beckett monologues, Old Earth. First, on June 9, was something altogether more familiar.

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.

Le jeudi 4 juin, l'ensemble La Nuova Musica de David Bates interprétait l’un des plus grands oratorios de Haendel, Israël en Egypte (1739). Une restitution décapante, pleine d’énergie et d’ardeur !