The late madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, with their intense chromatic language, have held strong attractions for contemporary composers -- indeed more so for those oriented toward music of past eras than for modernist systematizers. Swiss composer
Klaus Huber here extends Gesualdo's language with a group of new compositions; he writes of that language as an antidote to the "ascendancy of panchromaticism, which became
totalitarian in this century" (booklet notes are in French and German, but an English translation is available on the website of the performers, Les Jeunes Solistes).
Huber's wrinkle is to take up not Gesualdo's secular madrigals but his responsories for Holy Week, which are perhaps even more bizarre in their effect -- partly because of the tabloid-headline qualities of Gesualdo's biography. The project was inspired, according to
Huber, by conductor Rachid Safir and his ensemble Les Jeunes Solistes, and the music is a good fit with the group's precise, rather mysterious style. The program includes three of Gesualdo's responsories, all for six voices a cappella. They are interspersed among
Huber's own compositions, which have something of the nature of glosses. They add a continuo-like pair of instruments, bass clarinet and theorbo, and also, occasionally, a spoken-word element. To the Latin texts from the book of Jeremiah they append French passages, by
Huber himself and others, that have contemporary significance: that for the Lectio tertia, track 6, reads: "As long as you adore the market like an idol, the lord your god who loves the poor of this world, to the point of death on the cross, will turn not His face unto you" (the texts, in whatever language, are available only on the performers' website). And the chromatic language is pushed to the edge of tonality but not beyond. What remains linked to Gesualdo is the polyphonic writing, which has the same alluring dualism of calm technique and hyperexpressive text setting. Gesualdo remains the favorite Renaissance composer of quite a few people, even as he is increasingly seen as the representative of a tradition's mannered tail end rather than as a proto-modernist, and those people will be fascinated with this release.