New York Classical Review

Bill Barclay, previous artistic director of Music Before 1800, is also the founder and artistic director of Concert Theater Works; concentrating on the latter is one of the reasons he left the post at the former. 

What Barclay does at Concert Theater Works is take music and transform it into theater that adds historical context and drama. Music Before 1800 has already presented some of his productions, including his great Secret Byrd, which presents a William Byrd Mass as sung by a small group of Catholics conducting the sacraments in secret in Reformation England.

Barclay’s work was back at Music Before 1800 with The Death of Gesualdo, presented Friday night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Co-commissioned by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Centre for Early Music, it has a parallel to Secret Byrd in that it is a dramatic realization, based in history, of Renaissance vocal music. 

The title says it all: the ensemble The Gesualdo Six, directed by its bass Owain Park, sang a sequence of individual selections from various secular Madrigals and sacred works, accompanied by a silent stage performance portraying scenes from the life and legacy of Gesualdo, composer, Prince of Venosa, and murderer.

The show begins with Gesualdo’s body lying on the altar, then flashes back to scenes from his life: his marriage; his honor murder of his wife and her lover, the Duke of Andria; his continuing life as essentially a sadomasochistic flagellant. 

What makes Gesualdo such a compelling subject—apart from the lurid sensationalism of his biography, of course—is his music, with its deeply involuted manner. His is one of the most individually psychological styles in the classical tradition, self-obsessed like Mahler but private, full of structural idiosyncrasies that sound ruminative. The two things together make an irresistible puzzle: what is the connection between the violence in him and his music?

The Death of Gesualdo doesn’t offer an answer to this, and  Barclay’s production doesn’t really explore any connection between art and life. The irony is that Barclay, who in the program notes (a reprint of an article published in The Guardian) insightfully describes Gesualdo’s style as mannerist, adds his own thick layer of mannerism on top. A group of actors portray Gesualdo, his wife, the Duke, and others—including a Catholic cardinal—in a series of tableaux-vivantes and pantomimes (there is also some puppetry, but used so inconsistently that it barely registers).

With the Gesualdo Six’s exquisite and precisely tuned singing in this evocative, resonant space, the work comes off as cinematic, images with a soundtrack. But this is human-scale in a vast venue, with the feeling of an enormous distance between performers and audience, everything on the altar framed by emptiness. There is the precious smallness of a Joseph Cornell box, seen through the wrong end of a telescope. This is sonically and visually beautiful and also emotionally distant. One sees and hears but doesn’t feel.

Or at least doesn’t feel what Barclay feels. In his article, he writes, “I map Gesualdo’s tortured harmonies onto the painful episodes of his life, connecting his musical hallucinations with his descent into psychosis.” This balances on the word “tortured,” which is not necessarily wrong, nor is it right. In this elegantly mannered staging, what he hears as tortured another hears as ecstatic, even sublime eroticismof violence. Aristocratic costumes, crystalline vocal intonation, and luminous harmonies resonating in the cathedral read as beautiful, even the dissonances are what Thelonious Monk called “ugly beauty.” 

As the last image is cloaked in darkness, the Gesualdo Six sings “Moro, lasso” (“I die, alas, in my suffering”) and one hears not judgement, but Barclay’s loving but solipsistic embrace of the Prince.

The Irish Baroque Orchestra and countertenor Hugh Cutting perform “The Trials of Tenducci,” 5 p.m., March 15. mb1800.org