On Wednesday 20 July, John Eliot Gardiner leads the Monteverdi ensembles in a performance at the magnificent Kollegienkirche, as part of the summer festival at the annual Salzburger Festspiele.

Three Baroque choral masterpieces showcase the virtuosity of the Monteverdi Choir, and highlight the changing musical styles in Italy and Germany in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Carissimi’s Jephte, a miniature sacred musical drama written in the middle of the 17th century, uses an almost operatic style of solo writing alongside meltingly beautiful choruses to tell the Old Testament story of Jephtha, the Israelite leader forced to sacrifice his own daughter. Domenico Scarlatti’s 10-voice Stabat mater, composed in the early years of the 18th century, combines the old-fashioned polyphonic choral style with a passionate rhetoric, in a graphic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion with all the intensity of a Bernini sculpture or a Caravaggio tableau. The programme concludes with Schütz’s funerary work Musikalische Exequien, an exquisitely poetic meditation written for Prince Heinrich ‘Posthumous’ of Reuss.