Seasons in the sun at the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music

It's a tribute to the power, variety and sheer quantity of music from the 17th and 18th centuries that the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music has not featured Vivaldi's The Four Seasons since 1990. The event, probably London's best-loved annual celebration of early music, has had plenty of other choices. This year, though, its artistic director, the music critic Lindsay Kemp, settled on the theme of “nature's voice” as the unifying strand. That opened the floodgates.

The programme ranges from the return of Vivaldi's smash hit to a recital by the revered harpsichordist Andreas Staier, and from rarely-heard Bolivian music with the ensemble Florilegium to the dazzling Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in the final concert, called Baroque on the High Seas, which should create, er, quite a splash.

To make the event more festive, the nature writer Richard Mabey will give a talk about the relationship between music and natural science in the Enlightenment.

Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, various venues, London (www.lufthansafestival.org.uk) 10 to 18 May