The English Concert is set to deliver an extraordinary line-up for 2025-2026, featuring timeless masterpieces and celebrated artists. From Handel's riveting operas to Beethoven's symphonies, the season promises emotions ranging from love and jealousy to triumph and despair. Highlights include stunning performances at the iconic venues of Wormsley, Wigmore Hall, and Westminster Abbey. With renowned figures such as Peter Whelan and Iestyn Davies performing, attendees will embark on a musical journey through time and emotion, celebrating the depths of human spirit and artistic expression.

A Year of Artistic Triumphs: The English Concert's 2025-2026 Season

From the passionate arias of Handel's Rodelinda to the robust declarations of Beethoven's Fidelio, The English Concert's 2025-26 season promises a journey through time and emotion. This season, the orchestra collaborates with renowned artists like Peter Whelan, Lucy Crowe, and Iestyn Davies, bringing to life classical operas and concertos in prestigious venues across the globe. As they revive these historic works, The English Concert reaffirms its place as a beacon of classical performance.

The English Concert's 2025-26 Season: A Symphony of Masterpieces

Dixit Dominus allows us to see the moment when Handel emerged as a mature composer. Written in 1707 on commission from the powerful Colonna family in Rome, it represents the earliest major choral work to survive in the composer’s own hand. 22-year old Handel had already developed an excellent technical mastery of harmony, counterpoint and melody, and was ready to put these skills on full display.

Dixit Dominus (Handel in Malta)

St. Paul's Cathedral

Rinaldo’s triumphant premiere in 1711, replete with dramatic stage effects (including live birds), placed Handel at the forefront of the London opera scene. This concert performance brings the music and libretto of Rinaldo to life in one of Malta’s stunning baroque buildings.

Rinaldo (Handel in Malta)

Teatru Manoel

The English Concert brings their magic touch to Caramoor once again. After captivating audiences with all-Vivaldi programs in 2021 and 2023, this renowned British ensemble returns under Harry Bicket’s masterful direction from the harpsichord. Playing on authentic 17th-century instruments, they achieve something truly special—passionate, fiery performances that never sacrifice precision or delicate beauty. Experience firsthand why they’re considered one of the world’s premier period-instrument ensembles. 

The English Concert

The Rosen House at Caramoor

Hugh Cutting made history in 2021 as the first countertenor to win the Kathleen Ferrier Award and join the roster of BBC New Generation Artists. A rising-star soloist, he was hailed by the Times as “an exceptional voice: lustrous and rounded, with power in reserve and immaculate intonation.”

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The English Concert and Hugh Cutting at Wigmore Hall

Wigmore Hall

Join us with mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy and director Peter Whelan for a performance of Handel and Geminiani at the Buxton International Festival. The programme features Handel’s finest arias from Xerxes, Ariodante, and Hercules, along with stunning Concerto Grossos and Geminiani’s famous Follia. Don’t miss the chance to hear these masterpieces performed by two acclaimed artists renowned for their fresh approach to early music.

The English Concert and Paula Murrihy at Buxton International Festival

St John's Church Buxton

Vivaldi’s well-known setting of the Gloria remains as fresh and effervescent today as when he first composed it, probably for the girl choristers of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, where he was music director. Alongside this exuberant work by the Italian maestro are two youthful masterpieces from the pens of the greatest baroque composers of England and Germany respectively, Henry Purcell (himself an Organist of Westminster Abbey) and J.S. Bach.

Gloria

Westminster Abbey

Fidelio is a blazing musical protest against oppression that signals Beethoven’s implicit belief that humanity will eventually triumph over injustice and tyranny. John Cox’s iconic production of Beethoven’s only opera returns with Jamie Manton as revival director and Gary McCann’s striking design. 

Beethoven’s Fidelio

Wormsley

Handel wrote some of his most beautiful and characterful music for Rodelinda. Hatred and despair, thwarted love and resentment, and a fierce desire for revenge all combine to make a narrative of extraordinary power and potency. Director Ruth Knight collaborates with international award-winning designer Leslie Travers for this Handel masterpiece which will be conducted by Baroque specialist and Olivier Award winner, Peter Whelan.

Handel’s Rodelinda

It's exceptional, in the world-renowned quality, ambition and variety of its live and recorded output; unique, in the zeal of its players for working and performing together; unwavering, in its desire to connect with its audience throughout the world.

The English Concert, a globe-crossing period instrument orchestra led by conductor Harry Bicket, returns to Los Angeles for a single not-to-be-missed concert performance. This masterpiece of baroque opera is full of brazenly amoral characters doing dastardly deeds. As the men surrounding her plot to take the throne, the grieving queen Rodelinda tries to stay one step ahead of them all, while remaining faithful to the memory of her husband, presumed dead.

Don't worry: Handel’s endlessly inventive score makes sense of it all. It’s one of his greatest operas—and he wrote dozens of them, so that’s saying something.

The English Concert: Rodelinda

Los Angeles Music Center

An annual highlight at Carnegie Hall is the “luxurious Sunday afternoon featuring the period-instrument ensemble The English Concert, its artistic director and conductor Harry Bicket, and an impeccably cast and performed Handel opera,” wrote The Wall Street Journal after the ensemble’s 2023–2024 concert. This season, The English Concert turns its attention to Giulio Cesare in Egitto, one of Handel’s most popular Baroque operas. With exquisite ensemble work, charismatic singers, and a playful penchant for the theatrical, this concert performance brings to life the ancient dramas of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and more.

Carnegie Hall

A celebration of the work of three members of the Restoration Chapel Royal: Pelham Humfrey, John Blow and their younger contemporary Henry Purcell. Humfrey’s verse anthem ‘Lift up your heads’, a rousing setting of verses from Psalm 24, and Blow’s stately ‘I was glad’ for choir, strings and trumpets set the scene for Purcell’s peerless ode to music’s patron saint.

Music of the Restoration Chapel Royal with Amy Carson, Alexander Chance, and Anthony Gregory

The Grammy award winning countertenor raises the curtain on his Wigmore Hall residency with a special New Year’s Eve gala concert. Celebrate the new year with this magnificent collision of two of early music’s most renowned institutions, Iestyn Davies and The English Concert.

New Year’s Eve Gala: Iestyn Davies and The English Concert

Fresh from battle, Hercules returns home victorious, but Dejanira is consumed by a jealousy that sets off a tragic chain of events. With Handel’s soaring arias, inventive chromaticism, and powerful choruses, this opera reminds us that mistrust can bring even the mightiest to their knees. Thomas Broughton’s libretto draws from Ovid and Sophocles, with the chorus commenting on events as they unfold like a Greek tragedy. Harry Bicket and The English Concert tour the US, in collaboration once again with the scintillating Clarion Choir directed by Steven Fox.

Handel’s Hercules

University of California, Berkeley

Orpheum Theatre

Following their acclaimed production of Orfeo in 2022, we welcome back the same creative team to perform the second of Monteverdi’s opera trilogy. John Caird will direct and Laurence Cummings will conduct The English Concert on the stage, with a stellar cast lead by Cecelia Hall and Ed Lyon.

In the last five fruitful years of his life, Monteverdi wrote this opera for the carnival season of 1640, a time for music, dance and masquerading. His musical style, so astonishingly bold and innovative when he wrote Orfeo more than thirty years earlier, has developed yet further, with arias and duets that give full life and humanity to his characters.

The English Concert

Dec 16, 2025

Music of the Restoration Chapel Royal with Amy Carson, Alexander Chance, and Anthony Gregory

Dec 31, 2025

New Year’s Eve Gala: Iestyn Davies and The English Concert

8 - 15 Mar, 2026

Handel’s Hercules

Jun 12 - Jul 25, 2026

Il ritorno d'Ulisse

Nov 23, 2025

Dixit Dominus (Handel in Malta)

Nov 22, 2025

Rinaldo (Handel in Malta)

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