Leeds Baroque open their 25th Anniversary season with two contrasting Mass settings: Haydn’s well-known Nelson Mass - the 'Missa in angustiis' (Mass for troubled times) scored for voices, with soprano soloist Philippa Hyde, strings, three trumpets, and organ and, thanks to support from the Instituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of Spain, Valls’s Missa Scarla Aretina. This in contrast to the Haydn is scored for 3 part choir, single strings, two trumpets and harp. The programme opens with Vivaldi’s lively concerto for violin and organ – to give full rein to the Clothworkers Concert Hall organ, built by Goetz and Gwynn.

Hadyn and Vivaldi may need little introduction but works by Valls are probably less well known. Valls’s most famous composition, the Missa Scala Aretina – founded on rising and falling scales, became famous because of an audacious dissonance (an unprepared ninth sung by the second soprano at the words ‘miserere nobis’) that provoked a controversy carried out in a vigorous pamphlet war, an argument that continued for some five years between 1715 and 1720.