At the beginning of the 17th century a spirit of revival took hold in music, overturning all the musical concepts that had held sway for several centuries. Composers and poets set out to rediscover the music of antiquity, as they imagined it. So began the age of soloistic expression, of music in the service of a text and of the rise of basso continuo: the key characteristics of accompanied monody, which marked the beginning of what we now call the baroque. Giulio Caccini played a major part in the invention of this stile moderno. The programme selected for this disc consists of airs and madrigals taken from his two collections entitled Nuove Musiche, published respectively in 1602 and 1614. These represent a precious repository of the genre, in terms both of their artistic quality and of the musicological information with which they provide us.