Carlo Gesualdo, The Hilliard Ensemble

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, built a harmonic language so bold that his contemporaries met it with suspicion, and its chromatic progressions found real parallels only in the late Romantic era. He was a friend of Torquato Tasso, founded his own academy, which many leading madrigalists joined, and was a virtuoso on the bass lute. His six books of five-voice madrigals appeared between 1594 and 1611. The last two show that language at its most extreme, with harsh dissonance, sudden changes of tempo and a sense of drama that sounds modern. Here The Hilliard Ensemble records the complete Fifth Book, published in 1611.

For these five-part pieces the ensemble's regular line-up, David James (countertenor), Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold (tenors) and Gordon Jones (baritone), is joined by soprano Monika Mauch and countertenor David Gould. The recording was made in November 2009 at the Propstei St. Gerold, with Manfred Eicher as producer and Peter Laenger as engineer. Jones wrote the liner notes, and the cover photograph is by Mario Giacomelli. It is a return to the composer for the group, which had recorded Gesualdo's Tenebrae responsories for ECM years before.

The 21 madrigals set short, intense love poems in which desire, pain and death keep trading places. The ECM text recalls the music historian Hans Redlich, who heard this music growing out of "the antithesis between extravagant/debauched eroticism and self-castigating longing for death". Tu m'uccidi, o crudele is the most typical of them, its chromatic lines opening at moments onto passages of sudden light. The book runs from Gioite voi col canto to T'amo, mia vita, in about 55 minutes. It includes one madrigal in two parts, Poichè l'avida sete followed by Ma tu, cagion.

Anthony Pryer gave the record three stars in BBC Music Magazine in 2012. He wrote that "few vocalists if any could match this group for their tuning", but found the singers too restrained for the erotic drama of the texts. He singled out Mauch's high voice. Tyran Grillo, reviewing the album on ECM Reviews in 2012, wrote that the ensemble "emotes splendidly".

CD edition of ECM New Series 2175, first released on 30 March 2012.