By Andrew Clark [Financial Times, 8 February 2007]

Exactly 400 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, Monteverdi’s Orfeo received its first performance in Mantua. A few years later the new Banqueting House at the Palace of Whitehall hosted the first Stuart masques. It was impossible to miss the historical resonance of those two events on Wednesday, when the English Bach Festival performed Orfeo in the Banqueting House, still resplendent in sight and sound after four centuries.