Of all the great composers, Monteverdi is perhaps the most elusive. There's no popular caricature of the man, as there is of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. That is part of the justification for this production, woven around the composer's last years by the writer Kit Hesketh-Harvey, director Anna Tolputt and Christopher Monks and his Armonico Consort.
That lack of a general perception also allows Monteverdi to be portrayed in a way that might seem crass with a more familiar historical figure. Philip Madoc depicts an irascible man, more interested in dabbling in alchemy than writing music. He has to be cajoled into composing his penultimate opera, The Return of Ulysses, and, on the point of death, complains of the plans to bury him next to "that old fart" Titian.
Tolputt's staging has a superfluous trio of circus performers; and as well as playing characters in the narrative, the six singers of the Armonico Consort illustrate it with arias and madrigals. The rationale for what is sung in the Italian and what is in English translation escaped me, while the inclusion of the final duet from The Coronation of Poppea, almost certainly not by Monteverdi, is a bit of an own goal. Sometimes touching, sometimes banal, it's when the music is put first that the reservations drop away. Anything intended to gain a new audience for this composer's astonishing work must have its heart in the right place.
• At the Octagon, Yeovil (0193-542 2884), on 14 October. Then touring.
