Romeo Castellucci is going to offer us a double reflection on love and death based on Christoph Willibald Gluck's masterpiece, first in Vienna during the month of May, opening the Wiener Festwochen, and then in Brussels in June.

Since its first performance in Dublin on 13th April 1742, Handel's Messiah has been one of the indisputable icons of Western music. But do we know this oratorio as well as we think? This work represents a turning point in Handel's career, when his attention shifted permanently from Italian opera to the English oratorio.

A German grand master of the baroque and a Flemish pioneer of new music – on paper the contrast seems huge. Despite a gap of over two centuries between them, as well as the obvious differences, it is nevertheless possible to detect a shared quality in the music of Bach and Karel Goeyvaerts.

The semi-opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell unites theatre, dance and opera as a tribute to love and country. The original libretto by the English poet John Dryden tells the story of the quest of the Breton king Arthur to free his fiancé.

In the 17th century, the economic success of the Italian port city of Venice caused an explosion of music, theatre, dance and carnival. The musical output of Antonio Vivaldi was one of the upshots of this.

A light-hearted divertimento for strings by Mozart will in its turn be coupled with Haydn's First Cello Concerto, which brings out the many possible ways the instrument can be played.

The Biblical story of Judith, who hacked off the head of the Babylonian general Holofernes to liberate her city, Betulia, inspired the Italian poet and librettist Metastasio to write 'Betulia liberata'. The libretto was set to music by no fewer than thirty composers, from Jomelli to Salieri. The most famous of these settings was the oratorio that Mozart wrote in Padua in 1771.

What Britten admired in Dowland was his ability to descend into an abyss of suffering with his music and there, amid the bittersweet melancholy, allow a glimmer of joy to be heard.