A fascinating compilation detailing the highly expressive music of Prince, composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo - one of history's most colorful figures. Gesualdo's first six books of madrigals remain his best-known music.

Melancholic poetry provided endless nourishment for musical creativity in the late Renaissance. In his first recording for harmonia mundi, Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in music from the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Bryd to Gesualdo, Italian and English madrigals rub shoulders with motets and Tenebrae responsories, finding pleasure even in meditating on what causes one's pain.

Founded in 2012 by Cecil Gallois and Xavier de Lignerolles, the Ensemble Tarentule carries out research and dissemination work on the interpretation of polyphonic a cappella music. This exploration, seen through the prism of the madrigal at the end of the 16th century, is extended and enriched by the creation of a contemporary repertoire, in connection with the composers of today. The musicality of the Ensemble is due to the color of the voices which complement each other and have become accustomed to working together since its creation to find a perfect harmony and a specific sound - like the members of a string quartet.

Carlo Gesualdo is one of the most fascinating composers. It is hard to escape the temptation of seeing in his madrigals the tortured reflection of his psyche, beginning with the murder committed in 1590, when he caught his first wife Maria d’Avalos in blatant adultery with her lover Fabrizio Carafa. The madrigals of the Fifth and Sixth Books are to Gesualdo what the black paintings are to Goya: works conceived in a state of solitude, with no fetters on the artist’s imagination, born in enclosed spaces and used to moving around in their gloom. It is a music fitting to resonate in remote and unusual places.

'Is this great music or merely weird?' wrote John Milsom in his review of this album in Gramophone. Gesualdo's sacred music, like his secular madrigals, is both eccentric and passionate.

Although the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa constitute the best-known part of his oeuvre, his religious music is no less important, revealing a completely different facet of the composer. Aside from the Responsoria (1611), of which Philippe Herreweghe recently made a magnificent recording (LPH 010), most of Gesulado’s religious music was published in 1603 under the title Sacrarum cantionum . Unlike the Responsoria , intended for Holy Week services, the motets of 1603 are settings of texts for all circumstances of the liturgical year. For this recording, made in the Santa Trinità abbey church in Venosa, ODHECATON has enriched the sound palette of its men’s voices with a few instruments, including an ensemble of violas da gamba. Liuwe Tamminga counterpoints this programme with selected pieces by Giovanni Maria Trabaci and Giovanni de Macque on an historical organ of the Venosa region.

The successor to Music in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, this second volume in our History of Early Music is devoted to the music of the first part of the Baroque period in Italy, from the Florentine Camerata and the first operas to the heirs of Monteverdi; it was at that time that the freedom of structure characteristic of the beginning of the 17th century began to give way to the first traces of formalism. This period covers almost an entire century, beginning with the performances of La Pellegrina mounted in Florence in 1589 and ending with the final operas of Francesco Cavalli in the early 1670s. The sacred and the profane mingled and met during this period, which also saw the birth of accompanied monody, opera and oratorio, virtuoso performance and the sonata; it is precisely this same mix that we see in the Nativity by Caravaggio that appears on the cover of this set. The musical expression of this Baroque aesthetic is the subject of Jérome Lejeune’s accompanying dissertation.

Following the acclaim which met their 2-CD set devoted to the first two books of Gesualdo's madrigals (2020 Gramophone Award), Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants now focus on the composer's Ferrara period. Books III and IV mark a turning point in Gesualdo's output. The murderous prince's inner demons seem to be reflected in the heightened expressiveness of these madrigals, whose reliance on chromaticism and dissonance was so far ahead of it's time that it's like would not be heard again until centuries later.

Founded in Amsterdam in 1979 by Alan Curtis, one of the most acclaimed specialists in the interpretation of pre-romantic music, Il Complesso Barocco, has become a renowned international baroque orchestra with a focus on Italian Baroque opera and oratorio. Their rich discography was for a time devoted to the late madrigal repertory, and the film director Werner Herzog chose the ensemble as protagonists for his film Morte a cinque voci (Prix Italia 1996 and Premio Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1996) dedicated to the composer Carlo Gesualdo.

A stunning collection of some of the greatest sacred music ever written. From the great Lamentations of Byrd, Tallis and Palestrina, the listener is taken on a remarkable spiritual journey through Bach’s great St Matthew Passion, Purcell’s moving and bleak funeral music for Queen Mary, and Handel radiant Messiah. Pergolesi’s masterful setting of the Stabat Mater and Telemann’s Passions-Oratorium are also to be found here, along with Haydn’s Stabat Mater and his dark and intense masterpiece Die sieben letzen Worte, or The Seven Last Words of our Saviour from the Cross. Finally, Allegri’s hauntingly beautiful Miserere opens this collection – a work that was copied from memory after one hearing by the child Mozart. Prior to that moment the work had only been heard in the Vatican.

Having thoroughly explored the madrigals of Monteverdi, Paul Agnew returns to the genre, this time focusing on the work of Gesualdo, whose mastery of chromaticism and dissonance eventually turned these expressive devices into a defining feature of his musical style. A fascinating repertoire that Paul Agnew and his team delight in offering here.

The Second Book of Madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo provides the focal point for the latest in La Compagnia del Madrigale’s stunning reappraisals of the glories of the Italian madrigal on Glossa.
Probably written by Gesualdo between the time of the double honour killing of his first wife and her lover and his subsequent remarriage, the second book presents a sophisticated compositional mastery quite in keeping with the later books, albeit offering a calmer and gentler approach compared to the more tortured and twisted musical and psychological turns found in the last books.

Over the years Glossa has been at the forefront of releasing recordings of late Renaissance madrigals, and the label has had the pleasure of assisting superlative artists in doing so: none more so than the voices of La Venexiana and its director Claudio Cavina. This release is a reflection of such creative richness. The recordings on this release date from the dozen years after La Venexianas foundation in 1996, a time of great activity for the ensemble, and which complements the Monteverdi Complete Madrigals Books set, released previously. These two impressive collections demonstrate effectively why La Venexiana has been so popular with audiences and why it has been praised by critics as well.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, became famous for two reasons: the bloody double murder of his first wife and her lover, and his passionate and erotic view of profane love. The Madrigals chart the changes in Gesualdos style, and contain some of the most inspired and anguished vocal works in the entire madrigal repertoire, on the themes of love, rejection, death, suffering, joy and sorrow. Brimming with often astonishing and sometimes unpredictable melodic and tonal contrasts to express the agonies and ecstacies of love, Gesualdos Madrigals show him to have been one of the most inventive and eccentric musical minds of his age.

Gesualdo is now known to have composed some of the most intensely expressive music ever written – and is also known for the lurid details of his private life. The French ensemble A Sei Voci has rich-toned voices which illuminate this extraordinary music; this release is among the ‘second generation’ of Gesualdo recordings following the pioneering work of the Deller Consort in the 1970s. Their success paved the way for a wider recognition of Gesualdo’s genius in the 1990s.