A New Release of Gesualdo’s Sacred Music

One of the more satisfying achievements during my tenure with Examiner.com was to cover the Naxos recordings of the complete secular music by Carlo Gesualdo in a series of five releases issued between 2007 and 2011. According to my records, however, I did not complement the articles I wrote with any accounts of his sacred music until the spring of 2020, when I encountered Tenebrae, an album on the Spanish Glossa label that consisted of the music that he composed for the three Tenebrae services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, respectively. The publication of this music took place in 1611, the same year as the publication of his sixth (and final) book of madrigals.

Only recently did I learn about Gesualdo’s other major venture into sacred music. Sacræ Cantiones consisted of two volumes, which were published in 1603. This appeared between the publications of his fourth (1596) and fifth (1611) books of madrigals. This coming Friday, the French classical music record label Aparté will release an album of the nineteen five-part settings published in the first of those volumes. It will be released on Amazon.com only in digital form, available for MP3 download; and, as can be expected, a Web page now exists for pre-ordering.

The choir members of Il Pomo d’Oro (courtesy of PIAS)

The performers are members of a choir, which is part of a larger ensemble based in Italy called Il Pomo d’Oro. All of the motets in this collection are conducted by Giuseppe Maletto. Over the course of the album, the vocalists perform in different combinations, which are probably selected on the basis of the content of the texts. Thus, motet texts based on the Liturgy of Penance are likely to involve vocal ranges that differ from settings involving the Virgin Mary.

When I wrote about the Tenebrae album, I observed that Gesualdo’s interpretation of texts would lead to “highly unfamiliar uses of chromatic pitches for both sharply dissonant harmonies and sinuous melodic lines.” The advance material I received for the new recording used the phrase “painfully voluptuous chromaticism.” Personally, I painlessly enjoy my encounters with his chromatic strategies as much as Igor Stravinsky did. (He honored the 400th anniversary of Gesualdo’s birth by preparing instrumental versions of three of the madrigals, which he collected under the title Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD annum. When George Balanchine set this music to choreography, he gave his ballet the shorter title “Monumentum pro Gesualdo.”)

The second volume consists of twenty motets. These are scored for either six or seven voices. However, the lower parts were lost. James Wood reconstructed those parts for performance purposes, publishing his results in 2013. Hopefully, Il Pomo d’Oro will take advantage of this scholarly effort and release a “companion” album of that second volume.