Madrigal Book was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by the BBC Northern Singers, director Stephen Wilkinson. It is a setting of four love-poems from the turn of the seventeenth century. The first poem sings of the richness, but sometimes the incompatibility, of love, and the second is the mysterious song of Bathsheba, mother of Solomon and alleged seductress of David. The third song portrays the scorching pain of love, which all the oceans of the world cannot quench, and finally the heart-broken lover takes refuge in sleep, 'the image of true death'.