Carlo GESUALDO. Sabbato Sancto, Responsories
01 - 1. Sicut ovis ad occisionem [3:45]
02 - 2. Jerusalem, surge, [4:05]			play
03 - 3. Plange quasi virgo [6:46]
04 - 4. Recessit pastor noster [4:00]
05 - 5. O vos omnes [4:10]
06 - 6. Ecce quomodo moritur [6:01]
07 - 7. Astiterunt reges terrae [2:17]
08 - 8. Aestimatus sum cum descentibus [4:20]
09 - 9. Sepulto Domino [5:35]

Carlo GESUALDO. Motets
10 - Ave dulcissima Maria [4:30]
11 - Pecantem me quotidie [4:26]
12 - Tribularer si nescirem [3:08]
13 - Tribulationem et dolorem [4:08]

Sandro GORLI. Requiem
14 - Morti, moriamo ancora... [2:10]
15 - Bambino, quando moriro [4:41]			play
16 - Prendimi fra le tue braccia [2:19]
17 - Livre, livre, molto livre [1:57]
18 - Padre, Padre [2:49]

Ensemble Vocal Européen de La Chapelle Royale:
Sopranos 1 - Gundula Anders, Ellen van Ham, Dominique Verkinderen
Sopranos 2 - Susanne Norin, Wilke te Brummelstroete, Willemijn van Gent
Altos - Vincent Darras, Ralf Popken (#14-18), Kai Wessel (#1-13), Betty van den Berghe
Ténors 1 - Simon Berridge, Dantes Diwiak
Ténors 2 - Simon Davies, Hervé Lamy
Basses - Adrian Peacock, Peter Kooy, Renaud Machart

Philippe Herreweghe - director

The revival of early music in recent years has been due not only to instrumentalists who were interested in the instruments and treatises of the period but also to a number of ensembles of singers of a particular type. Musicians, above all, inquisitive, often highly cultured, they combine a substantial, albeit, in the context of the operatic tradition, still somewhat vaguely defined vocal technique, with a new type of sensibility which has won over a large public and thereby created the economic conditions necessary for serious professional work.

Their investigations have led to the uncovering or the restoration of numerous masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque periods; this alone would justify their existence. But in addition, the intensive and thorough contact with material as demanding on the level, for instance, of non-tempered accuracy and rhythmic and melodic definition as the motets of Josquin, de Lassus or Gesualdo, has led to the creation of an instrument of great precision, the keystone of which is that dense and luminous sonority, a thousand leagues away from the magnificently different operatic aesthetic.

And yet, even if the latter no longer seems to inspire composers (is the Opera not dead?), it is possible that the same is not true of a vocal aesthetic less concerned with the exaltation of the ego.

Because what counts, in the end, is form, the only source of real emotion, and it seems obvious to us that the "new" vocal typology is constitutionally more suitable to serve it.

It is in this spirit that we have decided to devote a part of the activities of the Ensemble Vocal Européen of the Chapelle Royale to newly composed works, with the conviction that the interaction between early and contemporary works will be stimulating in both a technical and a spiritual sense.

We have commissioned a work from Sandro Gorli suitable to our possibilities and destined to be closely associated with the Gesualdo programme we have under way. After the experience of numerous concerts, it now seems logical to include it in the present recording.

Our projects for the future aim at coupling Philippus de Monte and William Byrd with new works by Philippe Boesmans and George Benjamin, the compatriots of these illustrious ancestors. --- PHILIPPE HERREWEGHE

I've been searching for a superlative performance of the music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), and now I've found one, right in my own CD collection, purchased at least 15 years ago but still sealed and therefore never played. This CD is a welcome reissue of the one I have.

Gesualdo has become an almost mythical figure - the mad Italian prince who murdered his wife and her lover, and who wrote music that wouldn't be appreciated until the 20th Century. Like most myths, this one is nonsense based on facts. Gesualdo was a prince, with the fiscal resources to live his life as he chose, and he chose to compose. He did murder his adulterous wife in 1590, or hired thugs to do it, and fled to his castle in Venosa, not to flee the law but to escape a possible vendetta. His peers probably thought that the murder was necessary to defend his honor and that the couple got what they deserved. This was in Naples, remember. Just three years later, Gesualdo married again, to a daughter of the elevated D'Este family. For that wedding, he traveled to Ferrara, one of the most active musical cities in Italy, where the composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi was busy composing advanced madrigals for the "Three Ladies", famous virtuoso singers of the Ferrara court.

The other myth, that Gesualdo was ahead of his times, is easy to understand upon first hearing his music, which does feature chords and modulations that have the power to surprise even lovers of extreme modernism. Listen longer, and you will recognize that Gesualdo was schooled in the musical language of the Italian madrigalists, who had had taken the emotional temperature of the older Franco-Flemish polyphony into the red zone. In other words, structurally, Gesualdo is not so much different from Palestrina or Lassus. The Prince of Venosa just had the will and the skill to explore the outermost harmonic reaches of Renaissance musical theory.

So... Listening to this CD, within a few bars of the first vocal entrance, you'll hear intersections of the vocal lines - chords - that you've never heard in early music before. But the bizarre harmonies Gesualdo uses are not for musical novelty; they're part of his inflamed word painting. The texts of these devotional motets for Sabbato Sancto (Holy Sabbath) are laments over the Crucifixion, the musical match for the picture of the dead Jesus on the CD cover. Flamboyant emotionalism is what sets Gesualdo apart from his peers, not mere dissonances.

Philippe Herreweghe and his Ensemble Vocal Europeen have done the nearly impossible. With a choir of fifteen voices, they have achieved the tight ensemble and perfection of tuning of the best one-on-a-part consort. The sound engineer for this CD has also performed a miracle; all those voices sound utterly human! Distortion is minimal; presence is intimate. Herreweghe is principally a Baroque specialist, whose ventures into Renaissance territory aren't always graceful, but this Gesualdo is a triumph.

The last five tracks of the CD are devoted to a Requiem by the modern composer Sandro Gorli, born in 1948. This Requiem is also an a capella choral piece, ever so similar to Gesualdo in emotional affect yet radically new in musical structure. Just listen to the two in juxtaposition, and I'm sure you'll realize how thoroughly a 16th C composer Gesualdo was. This Requiem is not included merely for contrast, however. Sandro Gorli can write! His Requiem is succinct, tonally beautiful, and quite moving, even after your emotional core has been shaken by Do Carlo. ---Giordano Bruno, amazon.pl

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[1] Baci soavi e cari
[2] Madonna, io ben vorrei
[3] Come esser puo
[4] Gelo ha Madonna il seno
[5] Mentre Madonna
[6] Se da si nobil mano
[7] Amor, pace non chero
[8] Si gioioso mi fanno
[9] O dolce mio martire
[10] Tirsi morir volea
[11] Mentre, mia stella, miri
[12] Non mirar, non mirare
[13] Questi leggiadri
[14] Felice Primavera
[15] Son si belle le Rose
[16] Bella Angioletta

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean soprano
Clara Foti mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni contralto
Gastone Sarti baritone
Dmitri Nabokov bass

Angelo Ephrikian – director

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murderer in 1590 of his guilty wife and her lover, later took a wife from the d’Este family, rulers of Ferrara, whose musical interests coincided with his own. He wrote a quantity of sacred and secular vocal music and a relatively small number of instrumental pieces. In style his music is unusual in its sudden changes of tonality, its harmony and its intensity of feeling, qualities that have found particular favour among some modern theorists.

Gesualdo, a nobleman of melancholy reserve, published six books of madrigals, the second of them originally under an improbable pseudonym. These include some remarkable and striking compositions, such as the five-voice Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, and the earlier Ahi, disperata vita. ---naxos.com

Gesualdo's reputation as a composer rests mainly on his five-voice madrigals, specifically those found in his fifth and sixth collections. This astonishingly adventurous music might seem like an historical aberration, but Gesualdo in fact began as a conservative composer, perfectly literate in the established vocabularies of Renaissance counterpoint. He developed his famous later style very gradually, quite deliberately and in parallel with other composers of his day. Anyone who wishes to hear the late works in their proper context needs to consider Gesualdo's first two collections of madrigals; the seeds of all that would come are found there.

Book 1 was published jointly with Book 2 in 1594, the year that Gesualdo married his second wife. The relatively conservative style of the madrigals afforded them a modest but sustained public success. Viewed against the harmonic background of his last works, Book 1 shows that Gesualdo was concerned with further developing the techniques of imitative polyphony. Instead of the subject motifs at the start of sections being neatly laid out without variation, Gesualdo tends to stagger the entrances quite closely, and almost never states the subject twice in exactly the same form. Everything is immediately in a state of change, with old forms of the material overlapping the new ones, until it's no longer quite clear, or important, which form was primary. It has the powerful, energistic simultaneity of a pun, and the sense of instability makes the music more tense and dramatic.

In Book 1, Gesualdo also shows mastery of difficult techniques like double counterpoint, in which two imitative strains are developed simultaneously. A lot of material gets rapidly passed between different voices, which can give the music a fabulously intricate surface. The passing around of material can also bring serious reconfigurations of the harmony, allowing for the exact same melodic lines to take on many different contrapuntal roles. It is a psychologically and technically sophisticated device that becomes poetic in the hands of first-rate composers.

One of Gesualdo's most idiosyncratic characteristics is his simultaneously sensitive and irreverent treatment of texts. In Book 1 this is already fully in effect. Even if he showed deep sensitivity to the mood of the poems, as well as an uncanny talent for drawing out different emotional readings of the same textual moments, he made absolutely no attempt to maintain the structural integrity of the poems. He applies his cutting, pasting, and shaping process to however he wishes, working and reworking, smashing and overlapping. The result, if read start to finish, is a strange collage of the original. The journey Gesualdo will take from here to Book 5 is a long one, but the destination was distantly visible from the very first step. If it seems clownish in its day-glo artificiality, the music of Book 1 should at least remind us that the hyper-emotionalism of the later books is mainly a stylistic affectation, even if its irresistible force of rhetoric makes it seem sincere. --Donato Mancini, Rovi

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[1] Caro amoroso neo
[2] Hai rotto, e sciolto
[3] Se per lieve ferita
[4] In piu leggiadro velo
[5] Se cosi dolce e il duolo
[6] Se taccio il duol s'avanza
[7] O come e gran martire
[8] Sento che nel partire
[9] Non e questa la mano
[10] Candida man
[11] Dalle odorate spoglie
[12] Non mai non cangiero
[13] All'apparir di quelle
[14] Non mi toglia il ben mio

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean soprano
Clara Foti mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni contralto
Gastone Sarti baritone
Dmitri Nabokov bass

Although he produced some valuable sacred music, and even some instrumental music, Gesualdo's main compositional outlet was the five-voice madrigal. A shred of a collection for six voices survives, but we don't really know what wonders it contained. His first two collections of madrigals appeared together in 1594 and were somewhat popular in their day. Compared to the infamous works of his fifth and sixth collections, the music in them is extremely tame, but all the seeds of the later style are there.

A number of the madrigals in Book 2, like those in Book 1, are taken to show that Gesualdo wanted to place himself into direct, competitive comparison with his contemporaries and predecessors. As an aristocrat, Gesualdo had to forge his musical reputation in face of the automatic judgment of "dilettante" or "dabbler" made against those of his class who tried to distinguish themselves in art. Not that the Prince of Venice, as he was, had any doubts about his genius, but he must have seen that his best hope for avoiding such demeaning charges was to confront the issue directly. So, a number of the pieces, O come e gran martire, Dalle odorate, and Non mirar, non mirare, to name a few, were settings of texts that had already been used by already prominent madrigalists. Two of those mentioned had been famously set by Luzzasco Luzzaschi, the one composer Gesualdo, in his absolute self-confidence, acknowledged both as an influence and rival to be feared. Dalle odorate in fact directly borrows elements from Luzzaschi's setting in order, certainly, to make the comparison more direct, but in a number of details he improves the work and shows himself already the more cunning, adventurous composer.

In Book 2 he demonstrates his mastery of accepted compositional models, his craftsman's patient care, and his affinity with developments of the madrigal in his time. At this stage he's mainly concerned with extending current contrapuntal techniques. The openings of madrigals for example, tend to be intensely cramped; instead of gradual reasonable introductions of the motifs and variations, he plunges us immediately, in works like Candida man into a volatile, fluid world where material is introduced and varied almost simultaneously. Elsewhere, he uses sophisticated contrapuntal techniques like double counterpoint, in which two imitative strains are developed simultaneously across the voices.

What's already most clear in Book 2, however, is Gesualdo's especially exquisitely sensitive appreciation of the texts he's using. With a glance at the text, and a comparison with settings made by others, we can hear that Gesualdo grasped poetic nuance in a way few have. Especially impressive is the way he can draw out several different emotional interpretations of the same phrase. In pursuit of the goal, he's already smashing the texts to bits, overlapping lines and phrases, and using severe, sudden contrasts of tempo to make instantaneous climate changes. His later harmonic and rhythmic adventurings only increased his power to express his inborn talents. ---Donato Mancini, Rovi

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[1] Voi volete ch'io mora
[2] Ahi, disperata vita
[3] Languisco e moro
[4] Del bel de' bei vostri occhi
[5] Ahi, dispietata e cruda
[6] Dolce spirito d'Amore
[7] Sospirava il mio core
[8] Veggio, si, dal mio sole
[9] Non t'amo, o voce ingrata
[10] Meraviglia d'Amore!
[11] Crudelissima doglia!
[12] Se piange, ohime
[13] Ancidetemi pur
[14] Se vi miro pietosa
[15] Deh, se gia fu crudele
[16] Dolcissimo sospiro
[17] Donna, se m'ancidete

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean - soprano
Clara Foti - mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni - contralto
Rodolfo Farolfi - tenor
Gastone Sarti - baritone
Dmitri Nabokov - bass 
Angelo Ephrikian - director

It is in Gesualdo's third book of madrigals that his notorious musical characteristics begin to appear definitively. Book 3 was published in 1595, only a year before Book 4; both were likely written while the composer was at Ferrara between 1594 - 1596. Many commentators like to draw a connection between the emerging restlessness in Gesualdo's musical style and the murder he committed a few years earlier. But, while it's impossible to consider the man and the music as totally separate, to overemphasize biography in discussing his work is spurious, simply because there were parallel and similar developments in the world of the Ferrarese musical elite. He did not come to his stylistic ideas alone; other composers with whom he had contact were moving in the same direction. The difference, as has been said, between Gesualdo and his contemporaries, as well as between the late and early works, is more of degree than of substance.

Several features emerge in fuller bloom in Book 3 than ever before; by this time Gesualdo is unambiguously composing for the throats and ears of the elite only. His use of imitation becomes considerably more flexible, even when using difficult double, or triple counterpoint. His melodic lines in general begin to become more harmonically forceful in their implications. It becomes fairly common for him to outline sevenths and ninths, intervals that are almost impossible for amateurs to handle skillfully. Of course, the harmonic language begins to expand as well. Diminished and augmented intervals become more common, as well as strange chord formations set in surprising harmonic rhythms. Gesualdo's extremely effective, idiosyncratic use of pedal points against parallel motion also emerges in Book 3. This will have much to do with how he handles cadences in the later, more difficult works.

The occasional capriciousness of these works is notable. In the interest of the creating more expressive melodic, contrapuntal motion Gesualdo seems at time almost indifferent to the unwieldy harmonic results. This is what leads one to believe that the harmonic style of the later works, which self-consciously use dissonance in a way that the works in Book 3 do not, was stumbled across in the course of his melodic yearning -- a happy dissonant accident.

Through all the new developments in Book 3, Gesualdo is nevertheless always in total control of the tonality of the piece on the larger scale. He usually, and always convincingly, begins and ends the pieces in the same key, no matter how far he's wandered from the normal territory of that key in the meantime. The miraculous concluding cadences, that work against all odds, lead to an impression at times that we're actually present with Gesualdo's mind, hearing it process a mass of terribly complex, diffuse information. But that mind is a hell of an engine; it spits it all back out in a neat little package, wrapped, ready to go. ---Donato Mancini, Rovi

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[1] Luci serene e chiare
[2] Tal'or sano desio
[3] Io tacero, ma nel silenzio
[4] Che fai meco, mio cor
[5] Questa crudele e pia
[6] Hor, che in gioia
[7] Cor mio, deh, non piangete
[8] Sparge la morte al mio Signor nel viso
[9] Moro, e mentre sospiro
[10] Mentre gira costei
[11] A voi, mentre il mio core
[12] Ecco, moriro dunque
[13] Arde il mio cor
[14] Se chiudete nel core
[15] Il sol, qualhor piu (six voices)

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean soprano
Clara Foti mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni contralto
Rodolfo Farolfi tenor
Gastone Sarti baritone
Dmitri Nabokov bass

Angelo Ephrikian – director

Prince Gesualdo's fourth book of madrigals for five voices was composed around the same time as the third book -- between 1594 - 1596, while he was at the court of Ferrara, having scandalous love affairs and hungrily absorbing the musical culture there. It is in these works that the "infamous" Gesualdo begins to emerge in his recognizable form. With a nagging ambition to be the first aristocrat considered a first-rate composer, he must have felt a terrible competitive pressure considering that the composers he was in constant contact with at the time were experimenting along the same harmonically adventurous lines. His later stylistic excesses stem more from that pressure than from the streak of violence in him that resulted in the overly-discussed murder of his wife.

Many new features emerge with force in Book 4. Double counterpoint, for example -- a mainstay of high Renaissance polyphonic technique that Gesualdo mastered and used to great effect in the first two books of madrigals -- here finds a new flexibility, pushing hard against its normal limits. It suggests the early stages of a new technical grammar. The major break with his earlier work, however, is in the harmonic and intervalic content: Diminished and augmented intervals, as well as odd sonorities and surprising, affective new harmonic rhythms become common currency in Book 4; the vocabulary of melodic intervals becomes so wide that no amateurs could even dream of performing the music anymore. Although madrigals are in essence a popular genre, often produced for amateur musicians' entertainment, Gesualdo is here writing for the élites of listeners and performers only.

What he is achieving most of all is a new intensity and freedom of melodic expression; the unusual harmonies are results of an expanded sense of contrapuntal movement, not its aim. Like nasty little ants crawling all over the pages, accidentals invade the music; every part of the polyphony becomes infested with expressive chromatic inflections. But the uses of these melodic movements are always tight and directed, and Gesualdo remains ever conscious of larger-scale tonality. No matter how far he strays into enharmonic danger zones, most of the madrigals begin and end convincingly in the same key. In fact one of the most characteristic new features is his specific uses of pedal points, a technique that seems to have developed as a means to eloquently handle complex resolutions to the home key from distant territory. Sometimes this entails aching suspensions that slowly transubstantiate into correct consonances; other times it involves beautiful figures such as two sustained outer parts framing parallel-moving inner parts. ---Donato Mancini, Rovi

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[1] Gioite voi col canto
[2] S'io non miro non moro
[3] Itene, o miei sospiri
[4] Dolcissima mia vita
[5] O dolorosa gioia
[6] Qual fora donna
[7] Felicissimo sonno
[8] Se vi duol il mio duolo
[9] Occhi del mio cor vita
[10] Languisce al fin
[11] 'Merce', grido piangendo
[12] O voi, troppo felici
[13] Correte, amanti, a prova
[14] Asciugate i begli occhi
[15] Tu m'uccidi, o crudele
[16] Deh, coprite il bel seno
[17] Poiche l'avida sete
[18] O tenebroso giorno
[19] Se tu fuggi, io non resto
[20] 'T'amo, mia vita'

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean soprano
Clara Foti mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni contralto
Rodolfo Farolfi tenor
Gastone Sarti baritone
Dmitri Nabokov bass

Angelo Ephrikian – director

Even if the extraordinary style Gesualdo achieved in his late madrigals had no influence on the course of music, it remains a major creative achievement. One of the key elements of that style, first fully heard in the fifth book of madrigals, is a percussive, gestural, use of harmony. His new harmony is made up of an unpredictable tendency to chromaticism, and the use of prepared and unprepared dissonances. At important points this is in fact used as a percussive element in the music. No other western composer would do this again in any significant way until the twentieth century. Harmony as percussion is an important compositional technique, springing from the fundamental conditions of musical sound. It is due to social/cultural considerations rather than inherently musical ones that we still receive harmony as percussion with shy ears. Gesualdo's early discovery of the technique should make us realize this.

One issue that is still left open to debate, however, is whether or not Gesualdo's adventurings were based on clear harmonic perception. Was he biting off more chromaticism than he could chew? It seems to depend on which performances you listen to, for if nothing else Gesualdo's music is difficult to handle well, no less because his Renaissance aristocrat's sensibility is so remote. But opinion has turned generally in his favor. Instead of exaggerating the musical significance of his personal neuroses, it's now understood that as a composer at least, he wasn't crazy. Quite the opposite: he was calculating, and coldly, fiercely competitive. Working among madrigalists in Ferrara who were experimenting along the exact same lines as he, he heard exactly how far his contemporaries had gone, were likely to go, and deliberately went further.

As with all great madrigalists, Gesualdo's stylistic choices can be understood as a result of zeal for bringing out the spirit of the text. Gesualdo avoids in Book 5 all clichéed, banal madrigalisms, such as having the bass fall to an extremely low note on a word like "inferno." Every illustrative idea he uses is an original thought, every moment so carefully and deliberately composed it's amazing to consider the sheer energy that went into each madrigal. But Gesualdo's most radical characteristic, that he shared with Luca Marenzio, is not his use of harmony, but his total abandonment of the ideal of smooth polyphonic flow. The music constantly twists and turns and changes radically. It is feverish, intense, totally Italian. And in his labyrinthine musical corridors, we often stumble on nasty harmonic surprises, set in waiting like booby-traps. Through conservative, skillful voice-leading, effective use of rhythmic contrasts (a very underrated factor in the music), and sectional repetitions, those harmonic surprises are made horribly impressive. Without the music's conservative elements, and his uncanny mastery of the total effect of a piece, these madrigals would disintegrate. Instead, by a miraculous coincidence of factors, they are unusually whole. Gesualdo's experiments were a "dead end" because he was an impossible act to follow. ---Donato Mancini, Rovi

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[1] Se la mia morte brami
[2] Belta, poi che t'assenti
[3] Tu piagni, o Filli mia
[4] Resta di darmi noia
[5] Chiaro risplender suole
[6] 'Io parto' e non piu dissi
[7] Mille volte il di moro
[8] O dolce mio tesoro
[9] Deh, come invan sospiro
[10] lo pur respiro in cosi gran dolore
[11] Alme d'amor rubelle
[12] Candido e verde fiore
[13] Ardite zanzaretta
[14] Ardo per te, mio bene, ma l'ardore
[15] Ancide sol la morte
[16] Quel 'no' crudel
[17] Moro, lasso, al mio duolo
[18] Volan quasi farfalle
[19] Al mio gioir il ciel si fa sereno
[20] Tu segui, o bella Clori
[21] Ancor che per amarti
[22] Gia piansi nel dolore
[23] Quando ridente e bella

Quintetto Vocale Italiano:
Karla Schlean soprano
Clara Foti mezzo-soprano
Elena Mazzoni contralto
Rodolfo Farolfi tenor
Gastone Sarti baritone
Dmitri Nabokov bass

Angelo Ephrikian – director

Gesualdo's Madrigali a cinque voci, libro sesto, published in the S. Molinaro collection of 1613, reveals the composer's fully mature style, and was written in imitation and rivalry, a common practice among madrigal composers, of Nenna's works. Especially notable are Gesualdo's chromaticism, modal counterpoint, and rhythmic invention in these 23 madrigals.

Like early ethnomusicologists who superimposed Western notation and ideas on ethnic music before asking the "natives" how they conceived of their own music (thus making many erroneous assumptions), puzzled commentators on Gesualdo's music have often utilized standard harmonic analysis instead of approaching the music from the ideas of counterpoint and modality that were prevalent in his time. Basically, the unusual chromatic progressions in Gesualdo's work are the result of raising and lowering individual voices by half steps as a kind of expressive timbre modulation, a brightening (adding sharps) or darkening (adding flats), tied to the meaning of the words. For example, the (in-)famous madrigal No. 17 "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo" (I die, languishing, of grief) opens with the slowly descending, sighing chords C sharp major, A minor, B major, G major, and cadences normally E dominant seventh to A minor. The first two chords and the next set of two chords both suggest some Wagnerian progression centuries ahead of its time, but in fact the writing is purely modal with these chromatic modifications to add expression. Many of the madrigals open with unusual progressions by minor and major third roots in block harmonies and then proceed toward straight, unmodified modal counterpoint in faster subdivisions of the main tempo; for example, No. 15 "Death alone can kill"...A major to C sharp major to A major ), No. 21 "Even though, through love of you, I am consumed"...E major to G minor), No. 2 "Beauty, since you depart"...G minor to E major), No. 6 " 'I go', and no more, I said, for the pain"...starts in a harmonic minor and later offers E diminished to B major to C minor, etc.), etc.

By contrast, many other madrigals are in a straightforward modal style, and are sometimes played instrumentally for variety when a performance is given of the entire Book. For example, Nos. 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, and 18. Expressive cascading imitations can be found in Nos. 14 (on the words "ardo per te" -- I burn for you), 13 on "Fuggi poi," 21 on "rimirar suole," 3, 23, 19, and several others. Rare skips by a large interval into a dissonance can be found in Nos. 4 and 13 with its spectacularly modulated extended ending. Gesualdo is also especially fond of Spanish-type Lydian mode cadences, especially throughout No. 7, and provides a lovely Mixolydian mode beginning for No. 22. Gesualdo is also fond of subdividing lines and syllables and of the emphatic pause effect, especially in No. 10 "Io pur respiro in così gran dolore" (Even in agony, I still breathe) where "respiro" is divided up to suggest someone gasping for air. ---'Blue' Gene Tyranny, Rovi

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