Name: Bach: St Matthew Passion - Royal Northern Sinfonia
Start: 2027-03-07T15:00:00
Location: The Glasshouse International Centre for Music

Nick Pritchard

Dinis Sousa

Alexander Chance

Hilary Cronin

Jone Martínez

Florian Störtz

Hugo Hymas

Matthias Dähling

Frederick Long

Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras

Royal Northern Sinfonia

With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in 1790, Haydn became a free agent, and Johann Peter Salomon seized the opportunity to bring Europe’s most famous composer to Soho. Haydn's music already dominated the fashionable Hanover Square Rooms, especially after the death of the London-based Johann Christian Bach (youngest son of Johann Sebastian), whose Symphony in G minor opens the concert's second half.

Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 2 was premiered at Hanover Square in 1784. A decade later, he embarked on his second trip to London, and from this period come two of his best-known symphonies, earning nicknames through their popularity: the "Military" (No. 100), and the "London" (No. 104).

The English Baroque Soloists have this music in their blood, and their use of period instruments casts these works in an entirely fresh light. They are joined by cellist Christophe Coin, making his MCO debut. Historically-informed performance specialist Peter Whelan returns to direct after a “thrilling” (The Times), "dazzling" (The Observer) and “unbeatable” (Scherzo) debut with the orchestra in 2024.

Haydn in London

St Martin-in-the-Fields

Led by the scheme’s Ambassadors Dame Sarah Connolly and Mark Padmore alongside Choir Director Jonathan Sells, the recital will feature an array of madrigals, partsongs, lieder and arias from across several styles and centuries.

The Monteverdi Apprentices Programme bridges the gap between formal education and a professional freelance music career, providing a comprehensive platform for emerging artists to thrive under the guidance of some of the most respected musicians in the field. The 2025/26 programme received a record number of applications, resulting in one of the most talented cohorts ever featured.

Over the course of the year, these singers have honed their skills by taking part in projects with the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, supported by experienced mentors from the Monteverdi Choir, as well as a series of specially-curated masterclasses with experts from across the industry. The Apprentices are the vocal stars of the future, and this wide-ranging programme presents a compelling combination of youthful energy and superlative musicality, refined by an intensive year working with “the best choir in the world” (Trouw).

Apprentices Final Recital

This seminal opera was premiered in April 1826 at Covent Garden Theatre with Weber conducting. Weeks later the composer died of tuberculosis, at the age of just 39, leaving an operatic legacy – Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and finally Oberon – that shaped the future of German Romantic opera.

Oberon is a work of magic and chivalry: enchanted horns, glittering fairy choruses, ocean storms and ardent love duets combining in a narrative that leaps from Bordeaux to Baghdad. Encompassing this fanciful plot is a score of radiant beauty: presaging Wagner and his leitmotif whilst drawing on wide-ranging traditions – the German Singspiel of Mozart, the English semi-opera of Purcell, and Weber’s longstanding interest in the music of non-Western cultures.

With a distinguished cast, newly-commissioned narration, and dramatic concert staging, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique will illuminate anew this English-language cornerstone of Romantic opera, two centuries after its London premiere.

Weber: Oberon

Royal Albert Hall

The Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras’ groundbreaking exploration of Rossini on period instruments continues with the crowning achievement of the composer’s final creative years: the Petite messe solennelle.

Described by the composer as “the last of my péchés de vieillesse" (sins of old age), the Petite messe solennelle was originally scored for twelve singers, two pianos and harmonium. Rossini orchestrated the work the year before his death, but never heard this version in his lifetime; its Paris premiere by the Théâtre-Italien took place in 1869, just a few years before Alexandra Palace Theatre was completed in London.

Rossini joked about the ambiguity of the piece in his inscription at the end of the score: “Good Lord, is this sacred music or opera to a religious text?”. The Monteverdi Choir’s versatility from 17th-century sacred music to 19th-century opera make it the ideal vehicle for this choral showpiece, while the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique will draw on its deep experience of French Romantic repertoire to recreate the sound world of Rossini’s Paris. Together, with a cast of exceptional soloists and led by Rossini specialist Jakob Lehmann, they will illuminate a work poised between devotion and drama, liturgy and theatre.

Rossini: Petite Messe Solennelle

Alexandra Palace

Continuing our exploration of Handel oratorio in 'staged' concert performances, Christophe Rousset brings his trademark operatic panache to this transcendental work. The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are joined by an international cast of soloists, each of them acclaimed for their thrilling performances of Handel.

London in 1750: rocked by earthquakes, and stunned by the 65-year-old Handel’s penultimate oratorio. The adopted Englishman had abandoned his tried-and-tested Old Testament formula for a work set in Christian times, and ending not with triumph and fanfare, but the minor-key death of hero and heroine.

The 18th-century audience shunned Theodora, but 225 years later this story of devotion and martyrdom is firmly recognised as a masterpiece, containing some of Handel’s greatest arias (‘As with rosy steps the morn’; ‘With darkness deep’; ´Angels ever bright and fair’), and choruses which range from the rollicking to the pious to the anguished.

The Monteverdi Choir is amongst the world’s greatest exponents of Handel oratorio, and Theodora requires the choir’s whole expressive spectrum, stretching from the piety of oppressed Christians, to the orgiastic revels of Roman pagans.

Handel: Theodora

Julio Prestes

Salle Gaveau

Teatro Municipal de Lima

Teatro Solís

Teatro Colón

Schwarzman Centre

Auditorium Parco della Musica

Harpsichordist and conductor Francesco Corti leads a festive programme that unites three composers at the heart of the Venetian school and its international influence: Gabrieli, Schütz and Monteverdi.

Giovanni Gabrieli was the defining figure of the Venetian polychoral tradition, writing magnificent works for spatially-separated vocal and instrumental choirs that exploited the immense architecture of St Mark’s. His student, Heinrich Schütz, fused the grandeur and theatricality of this Venetian style with the Lutheran intimacy and theological intensity of his native Germany. And Monteverdi, who became maestro di cappella at St Mark’s not long after Gabrieli’s death, brought his unique sense of drama and emotional immediacy to Venice’s ceremonial musical tradition.

Taking the Christmas Eve services as our guide, this programme weaves together the psalms and grand Magnificat of Vespers with the Mass and instrumental sonatas for Midnight Mass. This music is the raison d’être of the Monteverdi Choir, and together with the specialist period-instrument players of the English Baroque Soloists, they will recreate the glorious sound-world of a seventeenth-century Venetian Christmas.

Venetian Christmas

Masaaki Suzuki will conduct his acclaimed his vision of the work, performed according to Bach’s partbooks, with solo singers stepping out of the choir. The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists will be integrated with the most brilliant members of a new generation of Bach singers. 

To experience a performance of the St Matthew Passion is to participate in something larger than a concert. For Bach and his congregation, this music formed part of a shared act of devotion, a way of understanding and engaging with the central message of Christianity. But the generosity of Bach’s musical imagination allows the music to resonate beyond its original context with an extraordinary humanity, bringing solace and inspiration to performers and listeners, whatever our beliefs.

Bach’s earlier musical version of the Passion of Christ, the St John, was already extravagant and ambitious by the standards of the time.  The St Matthew, composed for Leipzig in 1727, goes even further, with two choruses and two orchestras, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in ferocious opposition, sometimes in exultant unity. Bach illuminates the complex structure of the piece with amazing inventiveness, varying the instrumentation and musical structures, interweaving the ancient chorales of his Lutheran forebears through the biblical narrative and the reflective poetry of his collaborator Picander.

“A dream cantata date for Japanese maestro and local supergroup…Here was choral and instrumental Bach performed not just with meticulous professionalism but a dash and verve that filled each movement with an infectious enthusiasm.”

Bach: St Matthew Passion

University of Michigan

University of Georgia Performing Arts Center

University of California, Berkeley

Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts

Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Carnegie Hall

Princeton University

The Pennsylvania State University

Dinis Sousa conducts the combined forces of the Monteverdi Choir and Royal Northern Sinfonia in a performance of Bach's legendary St Matthew Passion, 300 years after it was first performed.

Bach: St Matthew Passion - Royal Northern Sinfonia

The Glasshouse International Centre for Music

EPSG:4326

St Matthew Passion