The music of Monteverdi and Marazzoli is rarely heard in close proximity but the pieces chosen on this imaginative coupling are musically connected in a surprising way. La fiera di Farfa, composed as an intermedio for the 1639 revival of Virgilio Mazzochi’s opera Chi soffre speri, includes a realistic market scene complete with street cries, folksongs and dances. From eyewitnesses we learn that oxen, mules and horses were all present on the stage (in the search for hyper-realism and comedy presumably), and taking their cue from this, Vincent Dumestre’s ensemble have produced a vivacious and highly characterised account. Indeed, with such an astonishing variety of animal noises, not to mention characters from the commedia dell’arte to cope with, it is difficult to imagine how they ever managed to get to the end of the recording session.

Then, as La fiera draws to a close, two of the comic characters parody Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which had been published just one year earlier in the Eighth Book of Madrigals. This naturally leads to Il combattimento itself, given here in a highly rhetorical reading which involves a great deal of improvised ornamentation, notably to the arioso section beginning with the words “Notte, che nel profondo oscuro seno”. The pros and cons of doing this are well enough known, and for all the evident virtuosity of Jan van Elsacker’s rendering, the result will not please everyone. Risk-taking also occurs in Hor che’l ciel e la terra, whose magical opening is taken at a pace that, as it dictates the speed of what follows, perhaps compromises the sense of overall architecture.