Five of Australia’s fine instrumental players come together for an excursion to the extra-ordinary. Contemporary improvisation in two striking duo formations meets the new world of around 1600 with violin and harpsichord – the era of “extravagant consonances”, when the theatre of virtuosity and spontaneous expression entered Western music. Composers include Claudio Merulo, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Louis Couperin. The concert concludes with a sequence of solo improvisations, radiating from the dramatic extemporising of the young J.S. Bach in his Fantasia in A Minor BWV 922