The story of Carlo Gesualdo gets more twisted the closer you look at it. He was a nobleman in Renaissance Italy who murdered his wife and her lover, before shutting himself away in a palace with a second wife and two concubines, amid an atmosphere of flagellation and suspected witchcraft. He was also the composer of vocal music so harmonically experimental that it still sounds as if it could almost be beamed in from another planet. Death of Gesualdo, created by the director Bill Barclay and vocal group the Gesualdo Six, tells the story to the composer’s own music, compelling us to look at it and keep on looking.
Like their 2023 creation Secret Byrd, it was co-commissioned by St Martin-in-the-Fields, and the dimly lit church setting lent an extra frisson to its premiere here. It starts in 1611, with the composer on his deathbed, then unfolds in flashback. Gesualdo is first seen as a child, represented by a puppet; then the actor Markus Weinfurter takes over. As a young man he’s given a piece of wood that might be a cross, a sword – or a lute, we realise, thanks to a bit of air-guitar-style miming as Gesualdo falls in love with music, a slightly silly episode that is perhaps the staging’s only false note.
Five other actors, silent like Weinfurter, play the other characters in Gesualdo’s life – his wives, a jester, a sinister cardinal. Choreographed by Will Tuckett, they move around the singers with stylised gestures that land in tableaux vivants; the music, woven from Gesualdo’s madrigals and his Tenebrae responses, unfurls around them. Costumed by Arthur Oliver, they might have danced out of the Italian Renaissance rooms in the National Gallery across the square. The lighting, coming largely from handheld LEDs carried by the performers, bathes them in an oil-painting glow, and their poses can be tender or extreme – when Gesualdo was caught mid-scream I found myself staring at the roof of Weinfurter’s mouth for what seemed whole minutes. Weinfurter is especially compelling, eliciting some kind of sympathy for his complex character; or perhaps that comes from the final image as the little-boy puppet returns, innocent and uncomprehending.
And all the while, there is the music. Singing with precision, pure tone and nuanced expression, their eyes blackened as if gouged out, the Gesualdo Six are outstanding – and even more impressive on this occasion given that one of their number was an understudy. Led by the bass Owain Park, the singing weaves a spell that is broken only once, when Gesualdo emerges, ghost-like, from the dark church aisle and a split-second of shouts and screams heralds the moment of the murders. This show is a creepy juxtaposition of beauty and horror, like the music of Gesualdo itself.
• At the National Centre for Early Music, York, tonight and tomorrow
