This programme is inspired by stories of madness, misplaced ambition and royal figures who lose control. Fittingly, all the music is by British composers of the modern era.

The centrepiece of the evening is Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, a music-theatre monodrama written in 1969. The libretto draws on real and imagined words of King George III during periods of mental illness, and the piece is as much theatre as it is music.

The King appears alone on stage, obsessively trying to teach his caged birds how to sing — a strange but historically true detail that becomes a powerful image of his unraveling mind. His outbursts, commands and fragments of song are pushed to extremes, ranging from speech-like muttering to shrieks, whispers and falsetto, and covering an extraordinary vocal span of more than five octaves.

Scored for solo baritone and a small ensemble; flute/piccolo, clarinet, percussion, piano or harpsichord, violin and cello, the musicians become part of the drama, at times portraying the birds themselves, at others the keeper who watches over the King. Even to this date, Eight Songs for a Mad King remains one of the most disturbing and perpetually new works of modern music theatre.

In line with the theme of birds and human foolishness, the concert opens with Sally Beamish’s string quartet The King’s Alchemist, an intriguing title with an interesting backstory. The work is inspired by the true story of John Damian, an eccentric alchemist at the Scottish court of King James IV in the early 1500s. Damian claimed he could turn base metals into gold and even attempted to fly from Stirling Castle towards France, an ambition that naturally ended badly. Beamish was drawn to this colourful character and to the gap between intellectual ambition and comic downfall, literally and figuratively speaking.

The concert is presented as a short, concentrated experience, performed without an intermission.