After Venice had been decimated by the two-year plague which swept through Europe, spread by soldiers in the Thirty Years War, Claudio Monteverdi was commissioned in 1631 to stage a thanksgiving service in the great St Mark’s Cathedral to mark the end of the pandemic. Afterwards the musicians and audience walked across the Grand Canal on a bridge of boats to witness the laying of the foundation stone of the famous plague church Santa Maria della Salute.

Bach Akademie Australia performs Grazie In Grazia. Photo © Noni Carroll Photography

This thanksgiving and salute to resurrection, in the city which had invented quarantine as a means of tackling a previous outbreak, resonated strongly with Bach Akademie Australia founder and Artistic Director Madeleine Easton. Therefore, after three difficult years of COVID, she set about closing the group’s 2022 season with a reconstruction, celebrating the return to live performance and paying tribute to the musicians, audiences and composers who miraculously survived the second wave of the Black Death.

This spectacular two-part concert – the Akademie’s Angel Place debut, which will go down for this reviewer as one of the highlights of the 2022 season...