The Full Monteverdi

Director – John La Bouchardière
Music Director – Robert Hollingworth

“Imagine sitting in a restaurant, and finding that it’s not just the couple at the next table who are quarrelling: six couples are breaking up and making up all around. Even more bizarrely, they are doing so to some of the most exquisitely intense vocal music ever written, Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals... a seamless account of the music despite being ranged far apart and entirely scoreless. A compelling but upsetting piece of theatre… a bleak but brilliant evening… in awe of the performance”

The Times (July 04)

“Music theatre hardly comes more visceral than this.” The Independent

“To feel the physicality of the music - the lacerating dissonances and the consoling resolutions - with such immediacy made this an unforgettable experience.” The Guardian

"I felt as if I was in the middle of the actual score. I never want to hear a straight account of this music again.” BBC Radio 4 

“Anyone who has ever loved and lost cannot fail to be moved by this.” Early Music Review

Monteverdi is the most listened to composer of his time but his madrigals are the his least understood and appreciated works. Perhaps this is because of the context. One can relate to the great human stories in the operas and the church music is a familiar world. But how can we become emotionally involved in the madrigals, miniature soap operas too short to develop any relationship with the characters?

The Full Monteverdi is an hour-long staged exploration of Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals (1603), generally regarded as the finest book of unaccompanied secular music ever written. Six couples watch their relationships unravel, in public space in the midst of the audience which voyeuristically spectates.

Further reviews (Southbank Early Music Weekend, September 2004):

“For sexual and intellectual spark, I Fagiolini's gauchely titled The Full Monteverdi - was a far better source. …this extraordinary experiment ... Less in the round than in the thick of it, these shockingly intimate a capella “conversations” took place at tables to our left, our right, in front of us and behind. …the delirium of hearing Monteverdi's harmonies in a form of surround sound that no machine could reproduce…

“So does his music suit this treatment? Absolutely. The stuttering, fumbling, ecstatic repetitions of "Ai bocca! Ai lingua! Ai baci!" in Si ch'io vorrei morire cry out for the hair-grabbing, lip-biting, get-a-room punctuation of intense physical contact. Never has the Fourth Book of Madrigals sounded more personal, more radical, more harrowing… The singing is, in one word, matchless. I cannot urge you strongly enough to watch out for any repeat performances across the country and go.”

The Independent on Sunday (26.9.04)

“I don’t know which I admired most: the daring of the concept (and its truthfulness to the madrigals’ anguished Italian texts); the brilliance of the acting, delivered literally in your face; or the consummate musicianship of the singers for memorising an hour of complex Baroque counterpoint and then keeping such rapport across a crowded room while never slipping out of character. But in the end, the real star was Monteverdi: the bittersweet poignancy of his harmonies and expressive power of his melodic contours illuminated afresh by being placed in such a realistic context.”

The Times (20.9.04)

“Even more enthralling were the singers of I Fagiolini. They performed an entire book of Monteverdi madrigals, each singer paired off with an actor playing the "beloved" addressed in the music. The smouldering looks and eloquently turned backs cleverly amplified the narratives of adoration, hurt, pleading and despair played out in the madrigals. There were no Celtic smocks; everyone was in modern clothes; we were all sat at bar-tables, the singers and actors moving among us. The air was thick with erotic intensity. "Early music" was nowhere to be seen. It was wonderful.”

Daily Telegraph (20.9.04)

“But almost as involving was watching the faces at various angles of one's fellow-listeners - absorbed, startled, self-conscious, embarrassed - as the musical give and take flew inches from their ears. It brought home how much immediacy is lost by having to sit in serried ranks in the modern concert hall.”

Independent (22.9.04)

“a profound musical experience. Splitting up the singers meant that the experience of listening was like being inside Monteverdi's polyphony, making every dissonance and suspension even more agonising.”

Guardian (21.9.04)