For their latest album for ECM, and over 20 years after their\nfirst recorded foray into Gesualdo with his Tenebrae Responsories\n(8438672), The Hilliard Ensemble turn again to the music of the\nItalian nobleman, this time to sing the entire Fifth Book of\nMadrigals.

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An aristocrat who forged an idiosyncratic style of musical\nexpression, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, was one of those\ncomposers in music history who can truly be described as being\nahead of his time: the creator of a harmonic language bold almost\nto the point of anarchy, whose every unpredictable interval was\nviewed with suspicion by the opponents of musical autonomy and\nguardians of liturgically based sacred music. A friend of Torquato\nTasso and founder of his own academy, to which many leading\nmadrigalists of the 16th and early 17th centuries belonged,\nGesualdo was a highly expressive composer and a virtuoso performer\non the bass lute.

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Yet his chromatic progressions baffled his contemporaries and\nhad to wait until the 19th century era of high Romantic period to\nfind resonance in artistic parallels. Among his most important\ncompositions are six books of five-part madrigals dating from\nbetween 1594 and 1611. The last two books in particular – this\nrecording by the Hilliard Ensemble brings new performances of Book\n5 – displays his dissonant musical language with its extreme\nharmonic disruptions, striking tempo contrasts and a distinctly\nmodern feel for drama.

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The Hilliard Ensemble’s expressive singing, here also featuring\nsoprano Monika Mauch and countertenor David Gould, conjures up that\nsound described by the great music historian Hans Redlich as\ngrowing out of “the antithesis between extravagant/debauched\neroticism and self-castigating longing for death”.

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