Venue: Shoreditch Church, London

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.

The Hilliard Ensemble celebrated their fortieth birthday at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, at St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch.

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.

Almost as remarkable as John Cage's actual music is how varied it is. Nothing obvious connects The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, a beautifully simple four-note piece for soprano and piano lid, to Four Solos for voice, a late work in which four singers independently do a series of strange things at the same time.

Bohuslav Martinů's Piano Quartet no. 1 (1942) is a beautiful work. The first and third movements are sharp and witty pieces which touch on jazz influences almost as strongly as on Bohemian folk music.

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’.

Pour la dernière soirée du Spitalfields Music Summer Festival, programme Haydn/J.C. Bach/Mozart/Haendel à Shoreditch Church, par le City of London Sinfonia et le chœur Polyphony dirigés par Stephen Layton : une clôture de festival réussie.