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What more natural selection with which to launch our 'Creation'- themed first Saturday, and to mark the joint anniversaries of Haydn and Darwin (the latter born in 1809, the year of the former's death). Haydn's Handel-inspired hymn to God’s 'glorious work' burst into life 60 years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but its masterly depiction of each new-created phenomenon – from blinding first light through primordial chaos to the arrival of mankind – has proved no mere seven-days'-wonder.

Paul McCreesh conducts massed Gabrieli forces in a recreation of the giant versions that Haydn himself directed in the last decade of his life. Celebrating 40 years as a music school, Chetham's sends its chamber choir to swell the vocal ranks. Mark Padmore and Neal Davies return later in the season for Handel's Samson (Prom 47).

There will be no interval