The final concert of Reykjavík Midsummer Music 2013 will feature some exceptionally good and colourful music. This includes the sharp-edged and fiercely original madrigals of renaissance composer, prince and murderer Carlo Gesualdo, which converse across the centuries with György Ligeti's ironic nonsense madrigals. Thomas Adès looks back in time some 400 years and “recomposes” a lute song by John Dowland and Sergei Prokofiev is under a distinct influence from Haydn in his swashbuckling first symphony. The song cycles of Ravel and Stravinsky feature extraordinarily beautiful instrumentation, but nothing excels Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs, an ode to a world of yesterday, composed three years after the second world war ended.