Gesualdo: Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday; Tallis: Lamentations

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, is a famously complex and tortured figure. He is famous for two things: killing his wife and her lover, and subsequently composing some of the strangest, most moving, and most emotionally intense vocal music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. His personal story would be odd enough; he seems to have been permanently wracked by guilt after killing his wife, and he eventually retreated to his castle and stayed there as a near-hermit, writing music to be performed privately for him by a small coterie of virtuoso singers. But what makes his story even weirder is the music he made. It was adventurously chromatic in a way that was more or less unprecedented, even in the wake of the Mannerist excesses of the previous century. Dense and astringent harmonies make his already emotional music all the more gripping, and this recording features his settings of texts that seem to reflect his moral despair: the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday. The all-male Gesualdo Six perform these works with a tenderness that somehow seems only to magnify their mad intensity. I would go so far as to suggest that these recordings represent a new standard in Gesualdo performance.