Word: gesualdo
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Dunster House Music Society presents Kletzsh's "Gesualdo," a short musical play for baritone and violin (performed by the composer) and Bach's "Art of the Fugue," with Margaret Dusenberry (violin), Konrad von und zu Tilleysburg (viola), Aideen Zeitlin (violin), and Peter Belmont (cello). Dunster House Library. 3 p.m. Free...
...schools of choral singing, presented a mixed program of sacred and secular music, not all of which was entirely suited to their voices. A set of madrigals early in the program came off particularly well, with good diction and full, robust tone, and a remarkable set composed by Carlo Gesualdo, a madman, was nearly as successful. The bizarre chromaticism of Gesualdo's music may reflect the turbulence of his even more unconventional private life--at age 30 he murdered his wife and her lover, and then finished off his infant daughter as well, on account of her uncertain paternity...
...case, the sextet navigated Gesualdo's twisting harmonies with usually precise intonation. The pitch problems that did crop up from time to time were invariably failures of individual singers to sustain difficult lines. Unfortunately, the sacred motets that opened the program suffered from exactly this type of difficulty, as did William Byrd's Mass for five voices. With only a single voice for each elaborate contrapuntal line, I Dilettanti were simply unable to maintain the warm blended tone they brought to the simpler, chordal passages...
...presuppose a different set of expectations. Just as the modal fabric of Renaissance music is foreign to the twentieth century ear, the context of modern music--a permanent background of muzak in supermarkets, television soundtracks and the stereo next door--bears no resemblance to the silence that Byrd and Gesualdo labored to fill. There are no grand gestures in this music, nothing simple for the listener or the performer to grab onto. If I Dilettanti Nuovi failed to provide the kind of pure sustained sound that can make the Byrd Mass compelling, their performance revealed a welcome insight into this...
...lesson of all great artists, that vigor comes from continuity, from the regenerative originality which only a sense of history as present in every living moment can nurture. He has been free to pursue his own thought because he has been quick to admit the timeless creativity of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, and Bach. A musical convention is a point of departure rather than a creative surrender. Stravinsky's music has always been imitative in the Aristotelian sense (which is the only sense), and always classical, never "neo-classical." "Neo-classical" is a fruitless neologism, a fetid, indurating bit of synthetic classification...