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Reviewer:
Iain Fenlon
For this, their first foray
into the schizophrenic world of Carlo Gesualdo’s five-voice madrigals, Les
Arts Florissants have selected their programme from the last three books,
pieces in which the highly-mannered and exaggerated aspects of the
composer’s style reach their most extreme expression. Nevertheless, we
should not think of all these works being undifferentiated in style, and one
of the fascination of this record, which has been very carefully planned, is
the insight it offers into the gradual emergence and sharpening of the
features which characterize Gesualdo’s late madrigalian manner. Some of
those elements can already be heard in Sospirava il mio cor from the
Third Book; by the last tracks they are present, with all their
compositional distortions, in full dress.
William Christie and Les Arts Florissants are no strangers to the aesthetic
of the Italian madrigal in its last decades, though I have often felt that
both their sympathies and skills are really attuned to the French
seventeenth-century repertories. This record, like so many of their
productions, is full of surprises on both the large and small scales. The
first, of a general kind, is the decision to add continuo accompaniments
avant la lettre. This is certainly justifiable on historical grounds
(even though continuo parts were not printed in the original edition),
though I am less sure about the precise way it has been done with some
passages within a piece still left a cappella. What is certainly less
justifiable, if only on artistic grounds, is the performance of two
madrigals on instruments alone (Io tacera and Corrente amanti);
it makes little sense to attempt such highly-charged word-driven music in
this way . What will also surprise some is the rather understated almost
classically pure character of the interpretations, though I am relieved that
the calculatedly neurotic and deliberately out-of-tune manner so often
turned out for Gesualdo has here been eschewed . Nevertheless, a more
vigorous projection of the texts would have been more faithful to the sound
of the Italian language. That said, these are technically very fine and
dramatically convincing and coherent readings which I would certainly listen
to in preference to any other record of Gesualdo's madrigals currently
available.
Also in Gramophone (09/2009) :
“…Les Arts Florissants recorded this more than 20 years ago and… its hardly
aged at all. This includes excerpts from Books 3 and 6, interspersed with
strikingly detailed performances on the harp from Andrew Lawrence-King. In
their rhythmic freedom they seem to prefigure what Italian ensembles would
achieve a few years later, but the cast is a very fine one, and the choice
of pieces superb.”
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