L’Orfeo: Monteverdi’s pioneering opera, brought to vibrant, heart-melting life by Robert Hollingworth and the virtuoso singers of I Fagiolini.

What better subject for a fledgling artform than the tragedy of Orpheus: the semi-divine musician, whose melodies charmed birds and beasts and could even (or so the poets say) soothe the torments of hell itself? Opera barely existed when Claudio Monteverdi composed L’Orfeo in 1607, and you can still sense the excitement, the freshness and the raw inspiration of an artform that was inventing itself on the hoof. It’s perfect, in other words, for Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini – the dazzlingly virtuosic vocal ensemble that thrives on the unpredictability, the emotion and the pure theatre of the baroque.

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