When I sit down to speak with Italian baritone Renato Dolcini, he isn’t at home in Milan but high up in the mountains of Trentino, on his way to the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, which has been curated by Cecilia Bartoli since 2012.

There, Dolcini will perform Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda as part of the Übers Meer (Over the Seas) program, conceived and conducted by Christina Pluhar.

“The theme of this year’s Whitsun is viaggo, so every concert is exploring a different [form] of travel, and this one will be through the seas,” Dolcini explains

Travel is very much on the Italian baritone’s mind as he prepares to join the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and its Artistic Director/harpsichordist Paul Dyer for Italian Serenatas – a musical journey through Italy.

Renato Dolcini. Photo © Jean-Baptiste Millot

Programming the concert has been “a conversation”, he says. “It was Paul’s idea, born of our first collaboration with Circa four years ago.” Titled Italian Baroque with Circa, that concert was also framed by the cities of Naples, Florence, Rome and Venice.

“We wanted to give people an idea of Italian music, and that was a quite brilliant idea,...