Gesualdo moved slowly but unmistakably from the conventional to the almost experimental. His later madrigals were certainly chromatic—famously dissonant at times. This third volume was published in Ferrara in 1595 by Vittorio Baldini, and reprinted three more times before 1619 in Venice. It is full of what would be surprises, if you didn’t know the composer and which still shock, if you do. The texts were chosen for their impact, their images, and their ability to sustain such musical sentiments and experiences as tension, contrast, jolts from the norm and perverse or contrary reaction.

They’re not gratuitously or spuriously eccentric, though. There is a logic to the way in which the emotion—usually human love and desire—is portrayed. Just what these are emotions that must be acknowledged rather than acquiesced in. Gesualdo is entering the real world of love, hurt, longing, regret. He’s not reproducing a formulaic analogue thereof. This is in large part because Gesualdo, beholden to no-one because of his social and economic status, was able to choose whose poetry he wanted; not that imposed by the whims of a patron. Guarini and Arlotti figure prominently as poets; most of the rest of the twenty madrigals are anonymous. There are two tracks of works from the few secular pieces not contained in the six books of madrigals by Gesualdo which this series will eventually comprise.

Significantly, the madrigals were also published in partitura (as scores) so that such impact could be accentuated by their study. Further, it’s to the advantage of listener, performer and composer that such close attention is paid to Gesualdo’s music in this way: for all that he was concerned more in this third book with the pure sound of the marriage of text and song, they are so dense, intense and studied (all good qualities) that they truly repay repeated close listening. Something new, delightful, exciting and fresh will emerge each time.

Performers of this music thus have a challenge: do they present the music ‘straight’ with little or no expression? This would in the first place allow its strong characteristics to emerge with slightly different emphases each time and in the second avoid imposing imagined or (worse) modern sensibilities on what must have been an extraordinary aural experience at the end of the sixteenth century. Then, do they infuse it with their own studied conclusions about the stretched tempi, the pauses, the chromaticism, the dwelling on certain phrases, the tortured combinations of notes, the rich yemore....

Review By Jeff Simon,The Buffalo News,July 2011

The annals of artistic sublimity aren’t exactly bursting with scandalous tales of murder. In the case of the great and hugely influential painter Caravaggio, there is even a tenuous relationship between the revolutionary art and the tempestuous proletarian life of the artist. In the case of Carlo Gesualdo de Venosa, the extraordinary harmonic daring and beauty of the music might seem the very opposite of the scandalous life of the wealthy prince who had his wife and her lover murdered in their bed after being caught in flagrante delicto. Marco Longhini, who conducted this gorgeous disc of Gesualdo’s Madrigals Book 3 writes in the notes that the general view of society at the time was “that a love strong enough to overcome social mores and ultimately to be worth dying for, had greater moral value than did the Gesualdo family honor.” Of the dark and violent mood of the second part of Book Three, Longhini says “the music that had formerly made him a happy, charming man was now an outlet for his new state of mind, his genuine suffering and the repressed feelings that had exploded into bloodshed.” Is it possible that Gesualdo’s revolutionary dissonance and daring and violent life were inseparable? A grim thought, but the music, and the performance here, are exquisite.