Aldeburgh's Easter Festival could not have opened with a bolder and more challenging programme: Carlo Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responsories for Good Friday. These meditations on the passion of Christ date from 1611 and form one of the sequences of offices for the last three days of Holy Week. Unexpectedly brilliant early evening sunshine may have rendered Blythburgh's flickering candles redundant, but the comparative austerity of the ancient church offered a perfect setting for this performance of the responsories by their foremost exponents, the Hilliard Ensemble.

The complex structure - responsories in three groups of three, interspersed with lessons from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, are themselves framed by settings of the Benedictus and Miserere - may have been testing, but the music had its own implicit logic. The simple ebb and flow of the plainsong settings, the brunt of which was borne with quiet authority by baritone Gordon Jones, was mesmerising, and this served to offset - as Gesualdo intended - the lacerating effect of the long successions of chromatic harmonies created in the thorny entangling of the six voices in counterpoint.

The last words of the dying Jesus form the religious and emotional focus of the sequence, and the Hilliard realised this with truly plangent expressivity. But the music also represents something of the metaphoric shadow which darkened the latter part of Gesualdo's own life and, while the degree to which his melancholia was the result of deepening guilt over the murder of his first wife and her lover will never be known, the aural portrait of a tortured personality seeking atonement emerged strongly. When the last rays of the fading sun lit Gordon Jones' face as he intoned the closing antiphon, it was an iconic image to set the seal on a remarkable evening.