The turbulent life of Carlo Gesualdo, the nobleman who murdered his wife and her lover and also wrote some of the most remarkable madrigals of the Italian renaissance, continues to fascinate composers. Luca Francesconi's Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer, commissioned by the Holland festival, is the third recent opera to be based on his life, following those by Schnittke and Sciarrino.

Francesconi calls his study of the events leading up to the composer's crime an "opera for the concert hall". But by most standards, and especially those parochial ones of British new operas, this is a highly sophisticated piece of music theatre, which in Amsterdam involved video projections and electronics as well as three solo singers, the all-male vocal quartet of the Hilliard Ensemble and the expert instrumentalists of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble conducted by Etienne Siebens.

Francesconi and his librettist Vittorio Sermonti saw Gesualdo as a transitional figure, one whose art pushed the music of his time to an emotional boundaries that could only be crossed by the invention of a new operatic language. (Gesualdo died in 1613, so might well have knwon of Monteverdi's Orfeo.) That provides the work's dynamic, which moves in 80 minutes from a musical world of stylised gestures and circumscribed harmonies to a much freer one in which every gesture and every deed seems to demand the full histrionic range of opera. It's a carefully plotted dramatic course. The audience is steadily drawn into the web of conflicting impulses and clashing ideologies at the heart of the story - the Mediterranean idea of the justifiable crime of passion against the north European prohibition on murder in any circumstances - as Francesconi's music, full of jagged expressive melodic lines, moves from echos of Gesualdo's own works to a language raw enough to depict and describe his crime.

The whole thing, strikingly staged by Giogio Barberio Corsetti with strong performances from Davide Damiani as Gesualdo, Eberhard Franscesco Lorenz as his Iago-like manservant, and especially from Alda Caiello as his wife's maid, was passionately committed - grown-up theatre from a composer with a real dramatic gift.

· The Holland festival runs until June 27. Details at hollandfestival.nl