Gardiner conducts Monteverdi: L'Orfeo

Opera barely existed when Claudio Monteverdi composed L'Orfeo in 1607 – so what better subject for a fledgling artform than the tragedy of Orpheus, the supreme musician, whose melodies could still the torments of Hades itself? In 2017, to celebrate Monteverdi's 450th birthday, the theatre of La Fenice in Venice commissioned Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to perform all three of Monteverdi's surviving operas. Gardiner first conducted L'Orfeo in 1967, and this stripped-back concert staging of this landmark opera draws on a lifetime's scholarship and engagement with the music of Monteverdi.