Astonishing
04/16/1999
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I really want to say something about this recording, but how can I express myself if I'm a total musical ignoramus? So I'm just going to copy & paste a Grammophone review that says it the way I never could:"Historically there have been two quite different views about Gesualdo and his music. The first, now of such standing to be almost traditional, is that he was a tortured genius whose personal unhappiness is directly reflected in a musical language whose intensity of expression, largely achieved through unusual choral juxtapositions and bold chromatic detailing, is truly prophetic. Leaving aside the clearly ahistorical aspects of this account (Gesualdo foreshadowing Wagner), it sees the Prince of Venosa as a great composer, a musician of such power as to attract the attention of Stravinsky among others. The contrary, revisionist view stands in complete antithesis; here Gesualdo's strange harmonies are seen as limiting and exaggerated, the products of a modest ability that would have attracted little attention were it not for the notoriety of his private life and his privileged position in Italian society.If any of Gesualdo's music can persuade the sceptics then it is surely this cycle of 27 Holy Week responsories, a coherent and stylistically convincing sequence of sustained beauty and vehemence. And although these works have been recorded a number of times previously, nothing can match the Hilliard's beautifully-structured and persuasive account. The overall sound is eloquently rich, with clear bright and seductively contoured upper voices underpinned by a firm, resonant bass line. It is the strength and careful articulation of the bass that is the key to the success of the Hilliard's deliberate and marked approach to the music; it functions as the motor of the style and permits the thoughtful presentation of the inner part-writing that is one of the many fine points of the interpretation. Allied to this attention to the complex gestural quality of the music is a rare grasp of the overall architecture of individual responsories. There is undoubtedly some truth in the criticism that some of the late madrigals fail to satisfy because of the heightened sense of disequilibrium, but the Tenebrae are controlled by contrast, and achieve this effect by careful alternations and repetitions of material. It is precisely through the rhetorical manipulation of repetition in, for example, the second responsory of the Feria quinta, that the music builds its emotional force, and the Hilliard's keen appreciation of this cumulative element of the piece pays handsome dividends. In short, these performances reveal a rare understanding of the inherent tensions of the music, both in terms of local detail and overall shape, and explicate them with great technical and musical artistry. I doubt that they could be bettered.""
Awe-inspiring and terrifying
Sator | Sydney, Australia | 06/13/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"With these performaces the Gesualdo legend lives on.
Don Carlo Gesualdo (1560 - 1613) was rich, artistic, and - as the second son of a noble Neapolitan family - free to indulge his passion for music. But disaster struck: his brother died, and it was decreed that he must carry on the line. The bride found for him - Donna Maria d'Avalos - was his cousin, and the greatest beauty in town. Older and more experienced, she had already sent two husbands to their graves (one, it is rumoured, from "an excess of connubial bliss"). Don Carlo fathered a son, after which he lost interest in sex. But it still interested his wife: one day his uncle told him she was brazenly enjoying a rip-roaring affair with the handsome Duke of Andria, and that whenever possible they would "invite each other to battle on the fields of love", sometimes even in his house. Alerted to the fact that Don Carlo knew about the affair, the Duke tried to persuade Donna Maria that they must end the liaison, but she said she'd rather die. Thus was the scene set for Don Carlo's historic act.
One day in October of 1590 he surreptitiously disabled his locks, then accounced that he would go out to hunt. He set off, only to creep back with a gang of men. The chronicles go into salacious detail about what happened next: about the night-dress Donna Maria asked to be put out on the bed, about the maid posted as sentinel, and the sudden commotion as Don Carlo and his men burst in to find the pair "in flagrante delicto di fragrante peccato". About the shots and multiple sword-thrusts, and the way Don Carlo couldn't convince himself the job was done until he had cut his victims to ribbons, and he had personally skewered his wife to the floor. He dragged the bodies out onto the stairs, posted a notice explaining why he'd killed them, and all the town came to gape at them the next morning. The Duke was still clad in his night-dress, while his paramour's "wounds were all in her belly, and especially in those parts which ought to be kept honest".
Neapolitans were riveted, with as many taking the lovers' side as that of their murderer. All the local poets were spurred into song, including the great Torquato Tasso, whose friendship with the protagonists gaverise to his tear-drenched sonnet "On the Death of Two Most Noble Lovers". Don Carlo's nobility ensured there was no trial, and he quietly withdrew to Ferrara, where he remarried, but was by then "afflicted by a vast horde of demons which gave him no peace unless twelve young men, whom he kept specially for the purpose, were to beat him violently three times a day, during which operation he was wont to smile joyfully."
Don Carlo built a private chapel, completed in 1592. Inside hung a painting depicting the Virgin Mary and saints all pointing to the sinner, Don Carlo, while the fires of purgatory burnt below - out of which angels pull the figures of a man and a woman. Could these be the murdered lovers before which Don Carlo implored forgiveness? His music certainly becomes filled with an obession with themes of guilt, sin, pity, and death - even the joy of love being mixed with a fascination with pain: 'dolorosa gioia', such 'joyous pain' being a typical outburst.
Never has there been a composer with a more macabre background than this, nor yet so muscially so obsessionally fascinating.
Stravinsky began his famous foreword to Glenn Watkins' biography of Gesualdo with the words "musicians may yet save Gesualdo from musicologist, but certainly the latter have had the best of it until now". This recording of Gesualdo comes closest to saving him from the musicologists. The Hilliards fearlessly journey through the vertigo inducing chromatic spirals leading into the strange, visionary world of this dark genius - a world into which other ensembles fear to treat, instead resorting to a sanitisation of the music to remove its sting - though who could blame them for wanting to? Particulary important is presence of the more harshly piecing tones of a counter-tenor in place female of sopranos, whose smooth dulcet tones rob the music of its visionary strangeness. Although the Hilliard Ensemble had been singing this music for decades, David James still said: "We don't sing it the way we sing most early music - we sing it as though it was contemporary. Even if you didn't know the facts, you'd still know it couldn't have been written by a completely sane man."
This is an extraordinary - and absolutely essential - recording that delivers in full measure. The recorded sound really is superb and amongst the finest of a capella music as I have ever heard. I implore ECM to keep it readily available."
Track Listings (18) - Disc #1