Carlo Gesualdo, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Brett Dean, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Tõnu Kaljuste

Gesualdo sets the music of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (c. 1566-1613), beside two living composers who answer it in very different ways. The Australian Brett Dean turns the madrigalist's life and crimes into a dark choral and orchestral drama. The Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür starts from a single Gesualdo motet and from his own links between early and new music. Gesualdo's pieces are heard as well, so the old music and its modern echoes share one programme.

The performers are the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under Tõnu Kaljuste. They recorded the album in February 2014 at the Methodist Church in Tallinn, with Manfred Eicher as producer. Kaljuste also made the string transcription of the madrigal Moro lasso that opens the disc. He had suggested performing Dean's Carlo with live singers, and trials in Stockholm in 2002 led to the version recorded here.

Dean wrote Carlo in 1997 for fifteen solo strings, sampler and tape. It begins with the chorale of Moro lasso, then breaks into a collage of voices while the strings work the madrigal's fragments into a 20th-century sound. Dean called this "moving between two time-zones". Tüür arranged the motet O crux benedicta (1603) for strings, and built L'ombra della croce, dedicated to Eicher, on its opening motif. Psalmody goes back to 1993 and the early music group Hortus Musicus, and it reuses ideas from In Spe, the chamber rock band Tüür founded in 1979. Revised in 2011, it is a kind of minimalism drawn from Renaissance and Baroque rhythmic patterns.

In The Guardian, Kate Molleson noted that the Estonians capture Gesualdo's dark psyche without overdoing it. For her, "most chilling is how they evoke glassy loneliness in hushed moments." Graham Rickson of The Arts Desk called Carlo "one of the most viscerally exciting contemporary works you'll hear on disc" and put the album on his best of 2015 list. Hubert Culot made it his Recording of the Month in MusicWeb International. The album was nominated for Best Classical Compendium at the 59th Grammy Awards in 2017.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2452, released on 18 September 2015.