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Gesualdo: Madrigals For Five Voices

by Matt Leece

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1.
Gioite voi col canto 03:02
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2.
Felicissimo sonno 03:34
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3.
Occhi del mio cor vita 02:29
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4.
'Mercè!' grido piangendo 04:57
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5.
Baci soavi e cari 02:42
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about

Tracks 1-4: Book V (Madrigali libro quinto), 1611
Track 5: Book I (Madrigali libro primo), 1594

Carlo Gesualdo: prince, composer, artist, alchemist, lunatic, murderer. Said to have single-handedly chopped down acres of forest (as a means to calm an inner tumult), Gesualdo is an intrigue in the field of Renaissance classical music, surrounded by fantastic lore, appearing to be some kind of troubled artistic-genius-antichrist. Gesualdo's status as Prince of Venosa granted him the freedom to write any type of music he wanted. This position of not having to please a patron or audience was vital to the development of his style; surely if he where a working musician he would not have been able to take such intersting risks in his composing. Today, his madrigals remain some of the most expressive examples of the form, using a chromatic language not found again until the 19th century. His music's passionate dissonance, an echo of his own bizarre life, paints a picture of the Renaissance not seen in other works from the time.

Upon discovering French guitarist Noël Akchoté's numerous recordings of Gesualdo's madrigals, I became captivated by the sound of Gesualdo on the guitar, and decided I had to do some recordings of my own. Playing vocal music on a guitar at first seemed destructive and somehow impure, but in the case of Gesualdo's madrigals, the removal of the text brings the harmony and counterpoint into full focus, creating a more distilled incarnation of his gorgeous writing. The abundance of unusual modulation and cross-relational treatment becomes immediately apparent in these guitar arrangements; the resulting skeletal texture resembling something not unlike the plastinated corpses of Gesualdo's wife and her lover, which still stand in the basement of a chapel near Gesualdo's former estate.

credits

released January 13, 2014

Composer: Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1560 - 1613)
Arranger: Noël Akchoté (b. 1968)
Matt Leece, guitars

engineering/artwork, Matt Leece

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Matt Leece Pennsylvania

Matt Leece is a musician, artist, and teacher who wants you to forget the word "genre."

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