Gesualdo and Victoria: Tenebrae Responsories – Nigel Short

Murder will out, even four centuries later, and even in the confines of the Sistine Chapel repertory. Signum’s new release, marking the Gesualdo quatercentenary with an unlikely companion piece by Victoria, asks its listeners to hold two entirely different definitions of sacred music in the mind at once. Nigel Short’s Tenebrae, an ensemble that has made something of a specialty out of Renaissance and early Baroque polyphony sung with contemporary tuning and razor-edge ensemble, brings off the pairing with a discipline that borders on the uncanny.

Start with the Gesualdo, because everyone does, and because it is, frankly, the reason to buy the disc. The composer’s biography is by now practically a genre unto itself — the double murder of his wife and her lover in 1590, the decades of guilt and self-mortification that supposedly followed, the flagellant rituals, the strange late portraits showing a man eaten from within. Whether or not you buy the psychobiography (and plenty of scholars now urge caution about reading the life directly into the music), there is no denying that these Responsories for Holy Saturday inhabit a chromatic language unlike anything else written before Wagner, and arguably unmatched until him. The false relations arrive like small shocks to the nervous system. Tenebrae’s sopranos handle the wrenching shifts — a phrase settling into what sounds like G minor before sliding, without warning, a half-step sideways into something with no name at all — with a purity of tone that somehow makes the harmonic violence more disturbing, not less. Cool singing of hot music. It works.

Short does not oversell the anguish. That is the interpretive decision that matters most here, and it is the right one. Too many performances of this repertory lean into the strangeness, wallow in it, turn Gesualdo into a proto-Expressionist wailing through the centuries. Tenebrae instead trusts the notes — lets the astonishing chromatic slither in a passage like “Tenebrae factae sunt” register as sound before it registers as psychology. The tuning is exact, the blend glassy, and the effect, paradoxically, more unsettling for its composure. I thought of the old Hilliard Ensemble recordings, still treasurable, and of the more recent Gesualdo Six performances, which push harder toward theatrical extremity; Short’s account sits somewhere between, favoring the long line over the isolated gesture.

Then Victoria — and the temperature in the room seems to rise ten degrees, sunlight through a rose window after a very dark crypt.

Victoria’s Lamentations, drawn from his 1585 Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae, occupy a different moral universe entirely, though they are ostensibly mourning the same events. Where Gesualdo fractures, Victoria consoles. The Spanish priest — who spent decades in Rome close to the Jesuits and to Palestrina’s orbit before returning home to serve as chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria — writes in a language of octaves, fifths, suspensions resolved with an almost physical sense of relief. There is chromaticism here too, make no mistake; Victoria was not immune to expressive word-painting, and there are moments of real harmonic daring tucked into the Lamentations. But the default state of the music is trust. Cadences land like a hand placed gently on the shoulder.

Tenebrae’s account of the Victoria is gorgeously sung — blend is the word, again, though here it serves serenity rather than dread. The lower voices have real weight without turning muddy; the ensemble’s basses, in particular, ground the polyphony with a warmth that recalls (dare I say it) the old Westminster Cathedral Choir recordings under Hillier and O’Donnell, without the boy-treble edge. Some will miss that edge. I did, occasionally, in climactic moments where a more astringent timbre might have cut through the sonic hall the engineers have built for these singers — the acoustic here is resonant, cathedral-ish, forgiving to a fault, and there are passages where inner voices blur into a wash of sound rather than resolving into distinct lines.

Still. The programming itself is the achievement. To hear these two composers back to back — the murderer-prince and the serene chaplain, writing music for the same liturgical moment within a generation of each other — is to understand something about the sheer range of expressive possibility available to composers working, ostensibly, within the same stylistic constraints of late-Renaissance sacred polyphony. Gesualdo stares into the tomb. Victoria kneels beside it, weeping, but already anticipating Easter morning.

Short deserves credit for resisting the temptation to make these two composers sound like they belong to the same expressive family merely because they share a liturgical occasion. He lets Gesualdo be strange and Victoria be consoling, and trusts the listener to feel the distance between them without editorial comment.

A demanding, beautifully sung, occasionally over-cushioned disc — and an indispensable one for anyone wanting to understand just how far apart two contemporaries writing “the same” music could actually stand.