Handel: Alexander’s Feast - Ludus Baroque, Richard Neville-Towle, Sophie Bevan, Ed Lyon, William Berger(2CD)

Twice a year, some of the UK’s finest Baroque players and young vocal soloists come together in Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh to give sell-out concerts of great and lesser-known works by Bach and Handel.

The chorus, hand-picked by Will Dawes, comprises a sensational selection of singers from Britain’s finest early-music consorts, including the Monteverdi Choir, The Sixteen, Polyphony and the Gabrieli and King’s Consorts. These appearances are unmissable events in Edinburgh’s musical calendar. Now, for the first time, listeners from further afield can experience the celebrated verve of these performances; Handel’s 1736 setting of a dramatic poem by John Dryden is the perfect showpiece for the vitality and abandon of Ludus Baroque and their rising-star soloists.