All points East

Serendipity is the best aspect of travel — the chance encounter, the unexpected discovery — and a journey overland to China by rail can throw up all sorts of surprises. In Moscow we bumped into the countertenor Michael Chance, who was there for the first of a series of recitals with the Soloists of Catherine the Great, and who whisked us off to their rehearsal in the city’s Catholic cathedral. This celebrated ensemble was founded in 2001 by Andrey Reshetin, a former violinist in a radical, agitprop Russian rock band, but classically trained and now dedicated to the authentic performance of baroque music. In the course of scouring the archives he has disinterred remarkable compositions from the Russian Imperial Court which the ensemble performs along with music played on the great noble estates in the 18th and 19th centuries, all wonderfully redolent of a lost age. A recent coup of theirs and their associated orchestra was the staging in Hamburg and St Petersburg of an early version of Boris Goudenow, composed in 1710 by the German Johann Mattheson — the first authentic performance of a baroque opera in post-Soviet Russia.