In the last of this week's programmes about Monteverdi in Venice, Donald Macleod looks at the composer's last masterwork - the thrillingly immoral Coronation of Poppea.

In his seventies, Monteverdi was coaxed back to writing for the operatic stage, and had a hit with The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland. To satisfy the demand for yet more, he wrote what many consider his masterpiece, The Coronation of Poppea, the world's first opera to be based on a real historical incident, and featuring real people on stage. The gossipy, scurrilous tone of much of the opera chimes very well with modern audiences, and seems to have done so with Monteverdi's contemporaries too. Today, we hear passages taken from a classic recording, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, given in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, in 1993.

We end the week with an unbridled, joyous recording of one of his best loved duets - the wonderful "Zefiro torna" from the ensemble L'Arpeggiata. Show less