Edinburgh’s own Dunedin Consort, under scholar and charismatic director John Butt, is fast becoming one of the UK’s most respected early music groups, renowned for its vivid, passionate performances that crackle with energy. They bring a sense of enormous excitement to the launch of the 2017 Queen’s Hall concerts – with the modern-day premiere of a recently rediscovered work by Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz. Combattimento is German composer Schütz’s transcription of Monteverdi’s bewitching Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,…

The climax of the Proms Reformation Day is a complete performance of Bach’s St John Passion. ‘More daring, forceful and poetic’ than the St Matthew Passion, according to Schumann, this is a work of almost operatic vividness that brings both a humanity and a painful immediacy to the Passion narrative. Bach specialist John Butt and his Dunedin Consort make their Proms debut in a performance that offers the audience the chance to join in the chorale-singing, reflecting how the work…