Madrigals Book I Carlo Gesualdo

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Delitiæ Musicæ conducted by Marco Longhini. • I - Baci soavi e cari (prima parte: 0:00 • Quanto ha di dolce amore (seconda parte): 3:31 • II - Madonna, io ben vorrei: 6:47 • III - Come esser può ch’io viva: 10:16 • IV - Gehlo ha Madonna il seno: 12:51 • V - Mentre Madonna il lasso fianco posa (prima parte): 15:23 • Ahi, troppo saggia nell'errar felice (seconda parte): 17:56 • VI - Se da sì nobil mano (prima parte): 20:53 • Amor, pace no chero (seconda parte): 23:12 • VII - Sì gioioso mi fanno i dolor miei: 25:12 • VIII - O dolce mio martire: 28:38 • IX - Tirsi morir volea (prima parte): 31:11 • Frenò Tirsi il desio (seconda parte): 34:28 • X - Mentre, mia stella miri: 37:14 • XI - Non mirar, non mirare: 40:03 • XII - Questi leggiadri odorosetti fiori: 43:05 • XIII - Felice primavera (prima parte): 46:36 • Danzan le Ninfe honeste e i pastorelli (seconda parte): 48:40 • XIV - Son sì belle le rose: 50:12 • XV - Bella Angioletta: 52:37 • Gesualdo's reputation as a composer rests mainly on his five-voice madrigals, specifically those found in his fifth and sixth collections. This astonishingly adventurous music might seem like an historical aberration, but Gesualdo in fact began as a conservative composer, perfectly literate in the established vocabularies of Renaissance counterpoint. He developed his famous later style very gradually, quite deliberately and in parallel with other composers of his day. Anyone who wishes to hear the late works in their proper context needs to consider Gesualdo's first two collections of madrigals; the seeds of all that would come are found there. • Book I was published jointly with Book II in 1594, the year that Gesualdo married his second wife. The relatively conservative style of the madrigals afforded them a modest but sustained public success. Viewed against the harmonic background of his last works, Book I shows that Gesualdo was concerned with further developing the techniques of imitative polyphony. Instead of the subject motifs at the start of sections being neatly laid out without variation, Gesualdo tends to stagger the entrances quite closely, and almost never states the subject twice in exactly the same form. Everything is immediately in a state of change, with old forms of the material overlapping the new ones, until it's no longer quite clear, or important, which form was primary. It has the powerful, energetic simultaneity of a pun, and the sense of instability makes the music more tense and dramatic. • In Book I, Gesualdo also shows mastery of difficult techniques like double counterpoint, in which two imitative strains are developed simultaneously. A lot of material gets rapidly passed between different voices, which can give the music a fabulously intricate surface. The passing around of material can also bring serious reconfigurations of the harmony, allowing for the exact same melodic lines to take on many different contrapuntal roles. It is a psychologically and technically sophisticated device that becomes poetic in the hands of first-rate composers. • One of Gesualdo's most idiosyncratic characteristics is his simultaneously sensitive and irreverent treatment of texts. In Book I this is already fully in effect. Even if he showed deep sensitivity to the mood of the poems, as well as an uncanny talent for drawing out different emotional readings of the same textual moments, he made absolutely no attempt to maintain the structural integrity of the poems. He applies his cutting, pasting, and shaping process to however he wishes, working and reworking, smashing and overlapping. The result, if read start to finish, is a strange collage of the original. The journey Gesualdo will take from here to Book V is a long one, but the destination was distantly visible from the very first step. If it seems clownish in its artificiality, the music of Book I should at least remind us that the hyper-emotionalism of the later books is mainly a stylistic affectation, even if its irresistible force of rhetoric makes it seem sincere. • [Activate the subtitles to read the lyrics in Italian/English] • Picture: The Musicians (1595-6) by the Italian painter Caravaggio. • Sources: https://t.ly/egNaX, https://t.ly/G9w9n and https://t.ly/vJpPi • To check the score: https://t.ly/GTyJB

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