Graindelavoix Records Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Music

Sixteenth-century portrait of Carlo Gesualdo (artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

At the end of last week, the Spanish Glossa label released its latest recording of the a cappella choir Graindelavoix, led by Director Björn Schmelzer. The composition of this ensemble tends to vary on the basis of the music being performed. The title of the new album is Tenebrae; and it consists of the music that Carlo Gesualdo composed for the three Tenebrae services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, respectively. Those following the above hyperlink to Amazon.com will see that this is an album of three compact discs. It is being sold by the Classical Music Superstore, which is handling the shipping.

The one-to-a-part performances in this new release require eight voices, many of whom sang on the last Graindelavoix album discussed on this site, The Liberation of the Gothic. Again, the only two women are the same sopranos: Anne-Kathryn Olsen and Carine Tinney. The male vocalists are alto Razek-François Bitar, tenors Albert Riera, Andrés Miravete, Marius Peterson, and Adrian Sîrbu, and bass Arnout Malfliet.

Tenebrae Responsoria was Gesualdo’s final publication, released in 1611, the same year as the publication of his six (and final) book of madrigals. For all intents and purposes, the settings of the Tenebrae texts follow the same techniques one encounters in Gesualdo’s madrigals. Only the nature of the texts has changed, although the substance of those changes may be less than one might expect.

For better or worse, Gesualdo is best known for having killed his first wife and her aristocratic lover after finding them in flagrante delicto. His Wikipedia page tries to establish this as a context for his style of musical composition:

The evidence that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life is considerable, and he may have given expression to it in his music.

As far as I am concerned, “may have” are the operative words in that assertion. I prefer to think of Gesualdo as a madrigalist inclined to set highly emotional texts without dwelling excessively on what drew him to those texts. What is more important is that the emotions in the words led to his exploring highly unfamiliar uses of chromatic pitches for both sharply dissonant harmonies and sinuous melodic lines. That same Wikipedia source cites Gesualdo as including all twelve chromatic pitches in a single phrase, deploying them in both simultaneous and sequential relations. Those relations so fascinated Igor Stravinsky that he prepared instrumental versions of three of those madrigals to honor the 400th anniversary of Gesualdo’s birth, two from the fifth book and one from the final sixth book.

It should be no surprise that the disquieting connotations of such dissonances should find their way into sacred music associated with the annual commemoration of the Crucifixion. To be fair, however, in the context of the wide diversity of music composed during the twentieth century, dissonance is not what it used to be. It is thus unlikely that Gesualdo’s Tenebrae settings will evoke painful reflections on either the suffering of Jesus or the texts drawn from the Old Testament Book of Lamentations. Nevertheless, one can still appreciate how much prodigious invention has gone into polyphonic treatment of the Tenebrae texts. Such appreciation will provide more than adequate grounds for the satisfaction of the attentive listener.