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JazzDigger Home > I - Jazz Artists > Israel > Item 20
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Gesualdo: Tenebrae
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by Paul Hillier, David Beavan, David Beaven, Carlo Gesualdo, and Hilliard Ensemble
Sales Rank: 196124
Price:$20.00
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Vocal ensemble performance doesn't get any more technically polished or musically affecting than this offering from the Hilliard Ensemble--an example of what happens when a group of individual singers performs as a spiritual entity. Of course, the music--the liturgically solemn tenebrae responsories--makes a perfect medium for such a performance, but these works by late-16th/early 17th-century composer Carlo Gesualdo are notoriously difficult, owing to their unorthodox harmonic and melodic language. For this recording the Hilliards augmented the group's usual four male voices with three additional singers, countertenor, tenor, and bass, fully exploring and exploiting Gesualdo's rich tonal landscape while conveying the work's profound spirituality. The sonorities' effects are alternately chilling, unnerving, calming, and comforting. The sound is exemplary. --David Vernier
Amazon.com essential recording
The cover photo on this disc--a black-and-white, uncaptioned close-up of a grieving figure--resembles nothing so much as a Calvin Klein Obsession perfume ad, or perhaps a Joy Division record. ECM clearly wishes to underline the proto-modernism and obsessive despondency that sets Gesualdo famously apart from his Renaissance contemporaries. Fortunately such canny marketing is backed up by the Hilliard Ensemble's gorgeous renditions of the legendary count's irresistibly dark, utterly fascinating music. --Joshua Cody
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Listener Reviews & Comments
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.
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Gesualdo: Tenebrae
by Paul Hillier, David Beavan, David Beaven, Carlo Gesualdo, and Hilliard Ensemble
Price:$20.00
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