And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.

She had a good musical upbringing with piano lessons, doing things like madrigal singing when she was young.

Are Gesualdo’s madrigals and Caravaggio’s masterpieces any less beautiful because the composer and the painter were murderers?

The poems that make up the first third of Spaar’s career overview are cast as madrigals: brief odes to everything from spring onions to 1970s New Jersey, with surprising notes of eros.

At best, Gidden’s singing and arrangement of a Monteverdi madrigal achieve remarkable eloquence.