Gesualdo: Sacred and Secular Madrigals by Bizzarini

There is no comfortable distance from Gesualdo. You either submit to the undertow or you don’t.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murdered his wife and her lover in 1590 — caught them together, killed them both, and apparently displayed the bodies in the street. He then spent the rest of his life composing music of such chromatic extremity, such anguished harmonic restlessness, that later centuries couldn’t resist reading the crimes back into the counterpoint. The madman theory. The guilty conscience bleeding into the score. It makes a good story. It may even contain a grain of truth. But as Marco Bizzarini argues in his liner notes here, Gesualdo’s contemporaries didn’t hear a lunatic. They heard a master. They praised his “exquisite counterpoint” and his expressive refinement — which is quite different from diagnosing pathology.

What the sixth book actually is, once you strip away the gothic mythology, is the work of an aristocratic amateur who composed entirely on his own terms. No patron to please, no market to court. When this collection was printed, Gesualdo’s name didn’t even appear on the frontispiece — only the dedication gave him away. The texts, almost certainly his own, remain officially anonymous. Social propriety, again. A nobleman wasn’t supposed to be a professional composer, and Gesualdo apparently wanted to have it both ways: publish the work, hide the author. The result is music of startling self-sufficiency. He wrote for himself and his circle, not for the world.

La Compagnia del Madrigale understands this. They are not a mainstream vocal ensemble attempting something above their station — they are specialists, and it shows in every carefully weighed suspension, every moment where the harmony pivots without warning into territory that still sounds strange after four hundred years. Francesca Cassinari, Rossana Bertini, and Laura Fabris anchor the upper voices with an inwardness that suits the repertoire exactly. This is not music for vocal display. It’s music for listening from the inside.

The sixth book is not the unrelieved lament its reputation suggests. The second half lightens considerably — “Ardita zanzaretta” is practically playful, and “Al mio gioir il ciel sì fa sereno” opens into something approaching genuine brightness. La Compagnia navigates these shifts without condescension, neither underlining the lighter pieces as comic relief nor smothering them in retrospective gravity. That tonal flexibility matters. Lesser ensembles flatten the collection into a monochrome of suffering.

The famous “Moro, lasso, al mio duolo” arrives — as it must — as the emotional summit, that extraordinary chromatic plunge on the word “morte” opening up like a trapdoor. La Compagnia take it at a tempo that feels exactly right: deliberate without being funereal, each dissonance given space to register before the voice-leading resolves it, reluctantly, into something only marginally less anguished. The ensemble’s blend here is remarkable — five voices that move as a single instrument with multiple timbres, no single line asserting itself at the expense of the texture.

Comparisons are inevitable. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Gesualdo recordings from the 1980s brought a cooler, more architectural approach — luminous, but sometimes at the cost of the music’s visceral strangeness. The Concerto Italiano under Rinaldo Alessandrini pushed harder into the expressionism, occasionally to the point of exaggeration. La Compagnia finds a middle path that doesn’t feel like a compromise. Their intonation in the chromatic passages — and there are many — is unfailingly secure without sounding corrected. That’s harder than it sounds.

What lingers, after the disc ends, is not the murders or the mythology but the sheer compositional intelligence at work. These are not the ravings of a disturbed prince. They are the precisely engineered constructions of someone who had thought very hard about what harmony could do — how a sudden flat-side lurch could enact the word “dolore,” how a held dissonance could make time feel suspended, how resolution, when it finally comes, could feel like an exhalation rather than a conclusion.

La Compagnia del Madrigale has made several fine recordings, but this one feels definitive — not because it exhausts the possibilities, but because it makes the strongest possible case that these pieces deserve exactly this kind of sustained, serious attention. Highest recommendation.