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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Shadow Voices Jul 01, 2009
"A Sei Voci" is one of the more eccentric ensembles in 'Early Music' today. Eccentricity might be taken for adventuresomeness, but not all of their experiments succeed. They've recorded the fabulous 'Miserere' by Gregorio Allegri using a written-out set of ornaments that remind me of the toys called 'transformers.' They produced two CDs of Josquin masses using a choir of children to sing the superius, with perhaps interesting but musically incoherent results.
It might seem that eccentricity would suit the music of Carlo Gesualdo (1561-1613), but in my opinion, the composer prince built in enough expressive originality without mandating any extra eccentricity from mere performers. The 'Six Voices' have chosen to sing these Tenebrae Responsories with a thin, slightly withheld "head voice" throughout. The effect, to my ears, is expressively penitential some of the time, but also stifled much of the time. Such a timbre would seem more suitable if Gesualdo had been French rather than Italian. If the six men sang this way in a side-chapel of a cathedral, without mikes, they'd be heard only by each other.
A more objective criticism is that the tuning is not flawless. Gesualdo is notoriously hard to sing, with all his oddly prepared dissonances and his strange chromaticism. However, the chromatics only achieve poignancy when the consonances are perfect. If you listen carefully to the chords with which the polyphony resolves, at the ends of sections, you'll hear what I mean even if you are not yourself a singer. Those chords are preponderantly simple triadic majors or minors, and A Sei Voci often fails to 'nail' them.
There are virtues to this performance, nevertheless. The ensemble is well-balanced and transparent enough to reveal the inner voices at all times. The rhythmic interpretation is excellent. I can imagine finding this performance 'spiritually' uplifting and meditative.
Of all Gesualdo's works, the Tenebrae Responsoria have been most often recorded, and because they are so musically curious, every performance sounds wildly different. The Hilliard Ensemble recorded all three evenings' Responses - Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday -as A Sei Voci has done. Andrew Parrot and the Taverner Consort have recorded the Responses for Good Friday, in the context of the plainchant antiphons, psalms and lectios, giving a sounder idea of what this music was about and how it might have been heard in 1611. Philippe Herreweghe and the Ensemble Vocal Européen have recorded just the responsories for Sabbato Sancto, but have included four very plangent motets by Gesualdo, and an impressive 'Requiem' by the modern composer Sandro Gorli (b. 1948). For one reason or another, I find myself more likely to listen to any of those three recordings than to the CDs by A Sei Voci.
2 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 The Disturbing Quietus Of A Mad Renaissance Soul: Jun 03, 2009
It is too easy to make a link between Gesualdo's dark, tormented music and his tragic destiny. Like a character in a novel, the Prince of Venosa savagely murdered his wife Maria d'Avalos when he surprised her one day in 1590 in the arms of her young lover, the Duke of Andria, after the composer's uncle had denounced them. Gesualdo then took refuge in one of his castles in the south of Italy, where despite a shaky second marriage he gradually shut himself away in a paranoid isolation exacerbated by the premature death of his two sons. By the end of his life he was sunk in a state of pathological melancholy and expiatory frenzy (he was reputed flagellated by adolescent boys every day) and died in 1613, completely insane.
Nothing would be simpler than to see the chromaticisms and dissonances peppering his music as the direct fruits of his troubled and unhappy existence. This, however, would be to ignore the fact that he had composed many of his madrigals before his wife's murder, even if they were published later; that he was familiar with the experimental madrigal style of Luzzaschi at Ferrara, and that he had deliberately turned away from the avant-garde developments leading to accompanied monody, opera, and Monteverdi. His own music forms a direct line with the polyphonists of the past, finishing in a harmonic cul-de-sac whose richness would only be fully explored three centuries later by Schoenberg. It is paradoxical that Gesualdo's music, so modern to our ears, was considered archaic and without a future in his own time.
It is true, nevertheless, that his Tenebrae Responsories, composed at the end of his life for his private chapel, were written when he was already in the grip of his masochistic and expiatory demons. Following the traditional "Lamentations of Jeremiah" (which he did not set) in the liturgy, and structured around a harrowing recitation of Christ's Passion, Gesualdo's six-part Responses for the three days before Easter (each consisting of three nocturnes of three responses and three verses) form a crescendo of harmonic clashes, exaggerated chromaticisms and rhythmic disturbances in a ritual that seems like a kind of sacrificial autotherapy leading to the conclusion that the composer saw himself, more or less consciously, as the Paraclete himself. The searing, dramatic quality of the spare vocal writing further intensifies the contrasts and bizarre effects already described, and we see in this work the idiosyncratic, tortured and compelling vision of a man haunted by his sin and the prospect of death.
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