We have asked to Rinaldo Alessandrini to perform Monteverdi’s most beautiful Madrigals from the 6th, 7th and 8th books, composed in Venice, including the famous semi-opera Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda from 1624. This masterpiece represent the very essentials of the opera genre: a lyric vocal able to translate all human feelings into music. In Il Combattimento it is the very notion of a clash between lovers that is brought to life in the most spectacular way. Il Combattimento is at the crossroads of cantata and opera and marks a milestone in the evolution of the dramatic art of Monteverdi in the same way as his Orfeo. The work is filled with intense emotion and poetry, breathtaking and passionate music as well as suffering and defiance – as in the confrontation between the Christian Tancredi and the Sarecen Clorinda, whom he loves but does not recognise. We will also hear the famous Lamento della Ninfa, a moving lament on the word Love, or the impressive Hor ch’el ciel on poems by Rinuccini and Petrarch. All the performers of the Concerto Italiano are experienced in the vocal techniques of Italian Baroque. Pain, simplicity, emotion, fervor unite, in perfect balance, with the multiple expressions of bliss.