Inflaming the most frozen hearts

I Fagiolini, one of Britain's most innovative vocal ensembles for 20 years, are giving a concert at the ballroom of the Phoenicia Hotel in Floriana on Tuesday.

Graduates of Oxford University, the performers specialise in renaissance, baroque and contemporary works. The group is the Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Award in 2006.

In Malta the group is presenting Claudio Monteverdi's Flaming Heart under the musical direction of Robert Hollingworth, a renowned Monteverdi expert. Flaming Heart brings together the rich variety of Monteverdi's secular music from a capella madrigals to intimate duets and grander works with strings.

Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the music of the renaissance to that of the baroque.

Enjoying fame in his lifetime, he wrote one of the earliest operas, L'Orfeo, which is still regularly performed. His masterpieces also include Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses, 1641), and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), based on the life of the Roman emperor Nero. Monteverdi also composed a total of nine books of madrigals.

The madrigal is a form of secular vocal music that flourished in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The earliest madrigals were published in Rome in 1530. Italy remained the home base of madrigal writing, although the form did spread around Europe and became especially fashionable in England.

Monteverdi was especially daring in his use of dissonance, or harmonies that didn't quite seem to fit. What the people of 1605 thought was dissonant sounds mild by today's standards.

But in Monteverdi's madrigals it's easy to detect the dissonant parts ‒ there's a sudden intensity of expression; the music turns exquisitely bittersweet or anguished, depending on the madrigal's subject.

• The concert was originally part of the BOV Opera Festival. Bookings may be made by phone on 2124 6389, by e-mail: bookings@teatrumanoel. com.mt or online: www.teatrumanoel.com.mt.