Orazio Vecchi had two stints as maestro di cappella at the cathedral in his native Modena, although early in his career he sang as a tenor at Siena cathedral (1571 74). The city’s intellectual circle included Girolamo Bargagli, playwright and author of a treatise on the pastime of groups playing ‘pleasant’ or ‘serious’ games. These Sienese night-time gatherings inspired Vecchi’s final publication, Le veglie di Siena (Venice, 1604). The first two games are canzonettas in response to spoken proposals from the ‘Principe’ (a ringmaster acted here by Antonio Fava). Il gioco delle imitation mimics the dialects and personalities of different Italians: three male voices mock a Sicilian peasant’s coarse extroversion, a conceited Tuscan girl named Brunettina with far too high an opinion of herself is lampooned by soprano, alto and tenor, and a Venetian’s long-winded and stuttering invitation to ladies to visit him in La Serenissima is treated with pinched nasal tones as if he were the dotard from commedia dell’arte. La Compagnia del Madrigale’s flexible musicality and humorous characterisations use diverse vowel colours and accents when Vecchi satirises foreigners who cannot speak Italian properly: a drunken German boasting that he is very good at eating lots of meat and draining cellars, and macaronic mangling of the language by an amorous Spaniard and lovelorn Frenchman. The next game, La caccia d’Amore, is five lively and witty madrigals that play amusing word games, such as the onomatopoeia of barking hounds, perplexed hunters searching in vain for Cupid, dissonance-drenched frustration at chasing elusive love’s shadow, and a few goes at a fiendish tongue-twister that Vecchi sets hilariously; the stumped Sienese give up and retire sleepily to their beds.

The final and larger game is Gli humori della musica moderna (‘The diverse affects of modern music’), which could be a sly dig at the theorist Artusi’s recent polemical attack on Monteverdi’s madrigals (Vecchi’s preface alludes to ‘those who know better how to contradict than to compose’). The company sing different styles that convey aspects of each of the humours – the classical theory of liquid substances in the body that dictate a person’s personality and moods. Vecchi draws poetic texts concerned with diverse attitudes to love from Petrarch, Guarini and Marino (and also paraphrases Tasso), to illustrate the game-players’ depictions of graveness, cheerfulness, licentiousness, sorrow (a setting of Petrarch’s ‘Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace’), flattery, melancholy, gentleness (an invocation to springtime flowers), affection (Guarini’s ‘Era l’anima mia’), treachery (a complaint at cruel Amarilli), sincerity and so on. La Compagnia del Madrigale’s experienced six singers might have striven for a wider range of paces and energies in some livelier humours that sound counterproductively rarefied: ‘vivaciousness’ lacks gleeful momentum and ‘enthusiasm’ (a ballo exulting in Carnival season) is incongruously calm. Nevertheless, Vecchi’s broad-ranging programmatic musical games are revealed as extraordinary.