| Gesualdo recording befits madrigals 04/08/2001 By Lawson Taitte / The Dallas Morning News Most recordings of Gesualdo degenerate into a freak show. This one actually makes music.
Don Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa was an Italian prince who neglected his duties, marital and political, to write some of the most "advanced" music of his day. In the years when he was writing, straddling the turn of the century in 1600, the old polyphonic style of writing was growing more and more convoluted and chromatic.
Monteverdi and his followers were radically simplifying and creating the new style that would become the baroque. Gesualdo, the moody, glorious amateur, wanted none of it. His madrigals and sacred music descended into a dense gloom unparalleled for the next 300 years.
The Italian nobleman became a cult hero in the mid-1900s – partly because of the chilly details of his personal life (he killed his wife and her lover, then blithely remarried), partly because modernists like Igor Stravinsky took up his cause. Stravinsky and his assistant, Robert Craft, sponsored some of the first Gesualdo recordings, using heavy voices that included the young Marilyn Horne. They made the madrigals sound very like Berg and Schoenberg.
As the early-music movement has permeated Italian musical life, we have been getting some remarkable recordings of Renaissance vocal music. La Venexiana, a group of seven singers and three instrumentalists led by Claudio Cavina, show how much a pure, vibrato-less sound and pinpoint intonation can do in this repertoire.
It helps, perhaps, that the CD is mainly devoted to Book IV (out of six) of Gesualdo's madrigals. The mannerisms of the music itself are a little less extreme than in the later pieces. Yeah, the characteristically morbid neuroticism is here, but so is a svelte sexiness entirely in keeping with the words. And that's what madrigals are supposed to be all about.
Gesualdo
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Madrigals La Venexiana (Glossa)
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