The madrigals of
Carlo Gesualdo
were new territory for
Les Arts Florissants
, a group that specializes mostly in French Baroque opera, but the cycle, which concludes with this double album featuring the composer's tortured
fifth
and
sixth
books, has been consistently strong and has brought many new insights; the album reached the top levels of classical sales charts in early 2023.
Gesualdo
and his style have been used in narratives that don't necessarily fit the actual music. For
Stravinsky
and his contemporaries, the dissonance-loving
was a proto-modernist, but
leader (and tenor voice)
Paul Agnew
points out that the trends in his music were also present in that of other composers of the Mannerist late 16th century. It is conventional to connect the experiments in
's music to the facts of his life: he caught his wife and her lover in flagrante, murdered them both, beat the rap at trial, and spent the rest of his life in seclusion.
Agnew
doesn't buy this connection, either, and his interpretations avoid the emotional extremes present in other performances. At the most intense moments, he may steer the singers just a bit toward spoken inflections, but mostly his dissonant harmonies are precise and cutting. The sound is a bit swallowed up in the Philharmonie de Paris, but the laconic statements of
's chosen texts are clear. A fine conclusion to a cycle of music by a composer who warranted a fresh look. ~ James Manheim