Gesualdo

Description

For this fascinating project, Australian composer Brett Dean and Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür drew their inspiration from the music, life, and times of Carlo Gesualdo, juxtaposing their reflections and the composer’s own music. The piece Carlo, composed by Dean in 1997, begins with the music of Gesualdo extracted from the 6th book of Madrigals, then gradually enters a very 20th-century sound world. Through the use of both sampled and real-time voices, as well as increasingly intense strings, Dean paints a hallucinatory picture of the mindset of the Prince of Verona at the moment he is driven to his violent crimes of passion. Erkki-Sven Tüür's L'Ombra della croce refers to Gesualdo's motet O Crux benedicta from the Canciones sacrae, a piece that will also be heard in an arrangement for strings by Tüür. Tüür's composition Psalmody completes the program.