Early music lovers should be in baroque heaven in 2017 as this year is Monteverdi year. As part of their contribution to the 450th birthday celebrations, Les Arts Florissants, one of the most respected ensembles of them all are paying a visit to Sydney with two programmes of madrigals that take a chronological stroll through Monteverdi’s life from the ardent young maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of Cremona to the game-changing radical at the Mantuan court of Vincenzo di Gonzaga.

Looking at the sober face and long grey beard of the familiar portrait, it may seem surprising that the first madrigals were written as early as 1585, when young Claudio was as little as 17 years old. As Paul Agnew, the ensemble’s British Associate Musical Director pointed out in his engaging and personable chats from the platform, the madrigal for Monteverdi was the laboratory in which he mixed and experimented to create the building blocks of opera. When the commission to write Orfeo eventually came in 1607, it would find the madrigal-primed composer ready and waiting.

The first concert looked at Monteverdi’s time in Cremona – the years of the first three books of madrigals – Book I (1687), Book...