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

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

Yet his chromatic progressions baffled his contemporaries and had to wait until the 19th century era of high Romantic period to find resonance in artistic parallels. Among his most important compositions are six books of five-part madrigals dating from between 1594 and 1611. The last two books in particular display his dissonant musical language with its extreme harmonic disruptions, striking tempo contrasts and a distinctly modern feel for drama. This recording by the Hilliard Ensemble brings new performances of Book 5.

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

Hilliard Ensemble:
- Monika Mauch (soprano)
- David James (countertenor)
- David Gould (countertenor)
- Rogers Covey-Crump (tenor)
- Steven Harrold (tenor)
- Gordon Jones (baritone)