Though this year's Lufthansa Baroque festival had a Spanish theme, it could never have allowed the major operatic anniversary of 2007 to pass unremarked. So the festival ended with a performance of Monteverdi's Favola in Musica, given by the singers and instrumentalists of the Italian group La Venexiana, under their director Claudio Cavina.

Anyone who has heard any of La Venexiana's superlative recordings of the Monteverdi madrigals will know how dramatically alive their approach to this music can be. Every bar of L'Orfeo had that same special charge, one that non-native Italian singers can never quite match. There was something compellingly immediate, almost rough-hewn about this performance, too, right from the rasping brass stationed in the balcony for the opening canzona, and the imprecations of Emanuela Galli (who was also Euridice) as La Musica.

Everything was so vivid, so innately theatrical - Mirko Guadagnini was a charismatic Orfeo, Gloria Banditelli the totally clear Messenger, José Lo Monaco a striking Esperanza - that a straight concert performance would have been quite satisfying enough. Yet there was a lavish staging: there were no sets per se, but all the necessary exits and entrances were present, together with multiple costume changes and props for the updating to Memphis, Tennessee on February 28 1977, the precise significance of which escapes me. Nevertheless, it was far more lavish and far more camp (with Cavina, who sang third shepherd as well as conducting, leading the campery) than Jonathan Miller's touring staging for New London Consort earlier this year. L'Orfeo does not need any such fripperies, and certainly none of the tacky humour that was thought so hilarious here.