Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. As well as a range of community projects, this year’s Spitalfields Winter Festival presents a series of ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. The ghost of Christmas Past still haunts Spitalfields. Audiences whose memories go back five years or more will ...

The drizzle and dark mornings are dire — but I don’t mind, because I’ve had my second taste of musical heaven in a week. Again, it was a dose of 17th century music that provided it, this time from the ...

For London music-lovers fed up with Christmas shopping and foul weather, the Spitalfields Winter Festival offers uplift and calm – and warmth (this is one church that isn’t draughty). You can slip ...

As cellist Tormod Dalen explained in a short address to the audience, the instruments were faithful to the period, bearing mostly naked gut strings, but with the odd steel-wound one thrown in, as ...

This opening concert of Spitalfields Festival 2021 was my first live music since March 2020. Approaching Christ Church Spitalfields, I felt a degree of apprehension: would I still be able to manage ...

Hawksmoor's imposing Baroque Christ Church is itself among the primary reasons to go to either of Spitalfields' two music festivals. Yet neither next Christmas's nor next summer's events will be held ...

Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.

Over at Christ Church Spitalfields, as part of the annual Winter Festival, John Eliot Gardiner has been serialising Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Actually Bach did so long before him, separating the ...

There’s a photograph of the nave of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, that sticks in my mind like few others. Taken by Bill Toomey in 1974, the photograph shows not the pristinely ...