This popular programme is based around two of the greatest religious works from eighteenth-century Italy. The psalm ‘Dixit Dominus’ was written by Handel in Rome for a vespers service in the summer of 1707, and is thus 300 years old this year. With its powerful choruses, virtuoso solos and brilliant orchestral writing, it was Handel’s first masterpiece and was to remain one of his finest church works.

Although it was written less than thirty years later, Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’ (1736) belongs to a different world, anticipating the tender and expressing galant style of the middle of the eighteenth-century. It was written to be performed in a Neopolitan church shortly before the composer’s untimely death at the age of twenty-six, and later become one of the most popular works of its time, being adapted by J.S. Bach and others.

The programme also includes Handel’s rarely heard choral setting of the psalm ‘Laudate pueri’ written for the same occasion as ‘Dixit Dominus’, and Albinoni’s ebullient Concerto in C major, op. 9, no. 6, for two oboes and strings.