Sestina joins the Irish Baroque Orchestra for a programme of madrigals by Monteverdi, interspersed with instrumental works by Marini, Castello and Castaldi

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There is something in the air in Europe around 1600. 

In England, William Shakespeare is reimagining what theatre can be and do, in Spain, Cervantes is inventing the novel as we know it. In Italy, Caravaggio is putting humanity under the microscope: art is no longer picturesque and balanced, but is full of gore, agony, rage, lust. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is the musical companion to these great minds. Immersed in the music of his teachers, he concludes that harmonic beauty and proportion are not faithful mirrors of the richness (and messiness) of human experience, and - in his settings of poems of love, loss, anger, desolation, lust - gives us electrifying and exquisite depictions of the beauty and pain of what it is to be most intensely alive.