The Gesualdo Six
Program Notes by Owain Park
The earliest known settings of the ancient Compline hymn Te lucis ante terminum appear as plainsong versions in Catholic liturgical books from the mid-16th century. In this intimate setting by Thomas Tallis, included in the 1575 Cantiones sacrae, two verses of the chant frame a simple five-voiced middle section in which the highest voice sings the melody. Tallis’s craft is reserved for the lower parts which subtly bring out the nuances of the text, a prime example of this being the wide-eyed chord that heralds the night’s ghostly company (‘phantasmata’).
Composed in the mid-16th century, John Sheppard’s In pace in idipsum is a fine example of a choral respond, alternating plainchant lines with polyphonic passages. The voices weave a delicately imitative train, sometimes pairing off for brief duets, before collectively building toward peaks which then dissipate through falling scales. Our edition was prepared by Guy James from the Gyffard Partbooks, held in the British Library, and transposed down a fourth from the original pitch.
Versa est in luctum was composed by Alonso Lobo for the funeral of King Philip II of Spain in 1598. The liturgical tradition of the time dictated that a sermon should be preached at the end of the Requiem Mass before administering the last rites. In some instances a motet was sung between the oration and the absolution, and this is such a piece. The text vividly describes heavenly harps, organs, and voices in lyrical mourning. A six-voice texture is maintained almost throughout, capturing the text’s anguish in descending melodic lines and wonderfully dark harmonic colors.
For a number of years, Donna McKevitt’s main compositional focus has been music for film and contemporary dance. The Gesualdo Six collaborated with the composer to create this 2020 setting of the Nunc Dimittis in Latin, Lumen. Responding to the text, McKevitt has selected certain words to be cycled through the voices, giving the work a hypnotic quality. When these eventually break out into duets, the new line of text is highlighted by this textural contrast. Lingering dissonances, caused by overlapping voice parts, give the piece a poignant, haunting feeling.
Written while he was a student at St. John’s College in Cambridge, Look down, O Lord by Jonathan Seers sets words from the service of Compline. At the opening, cascading short motifs mark out the harmonic territory, before the voices join together on the word ‘illuminate.’ Two ascending melodies then begin in the lower voices, leading toward brass-like chords for ‘brightness’ and ‘banish.’ At the end of the work the voices divide into two groups as the music disappears into the night.
Gregorian chant has run through sacred music for more than a millennium, and this piece is an example of this of this beautiful monody. Twelfth-century polymath and religious icon Saint Hildegard of Bingen was a prolific composer of devotional pieces. In its complete form, O Ecclesia oculi tui celebrates Saint Ursula, a martyr and leader of early Christians; in the opening section presented here, Hildegard begins not with Ursula herself, but with the greater church whose visionary faith in Christ was Ursula’s calling. Some of the hallmarks of Hildegard’s writing are clearly evident: phrases that begin with the leap of a fifth, and end by dropping just below the expected final note before resolving upwards.
Among the earliest known Christian hymns, Phos hilaron (‘Gladdening light’) can be dated to at least the fourth century on account of its inclusion in the Apostolic Constitutions—prescriptive texts compiled in the Syrian region in the 370s AD. Contemplating the dying light of the evening, the hymn has traditionally been associated with the ritual lighting of candles, and Owain Park’s 2017 setting, which features a solo line accompanied by soft-grained chords, evokes both the literal and spiritual contrast between darkness and illumination. The piece was written for Compline services in Cambridge and later morphed into a larger work that has been recorded by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, on their 2018 album of Owain Park’s choral works.
Illumina faciem tuam is a text taken from Psalm 31, In te, Domine speravi, the subject of Savonarola’s incomplete second meditation from prison. Heinrich Isaac’s setting from Choralis Constantinus exemplifies his mastery of polyphonic writing, with cascading melismas propelling the work forward.
In When David heard, Thomas Weelkes vividly portrays the grief and sense of loss felt by King David following the death of his son, Absalom. Weelkes continually reshapes the voices, at times leaving a lone singer to call out before the others answer, creating a profound sense of isolation. Musically, the work rarely settles; moments of relative harmonic stasis are interrupted by increasingly urgent exchanges, spiraling in chromatic intensity and often culminating in pungent dissonances before easing outward.
Joanna Marsh is a British composer who has been living in Dubai since 2007 and is currently Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Fading comes from her larger work, Arabesques, a set of four pieces composed for the King’s Singers in 2015. These are settings of short but highly evocative poems by contemporary male Arab poets, each telling the story of a woman they have known. Fading sets words by the Iraqi poet Abboud al Jabiri, who likens an aging woman to a bird shedding plumage. To achieve this image, Marsh constantly shifts the voice groupings and harmonies so that the music rarely feels still.
Luca Marenzio wrote twenty-three books of madrigals, and his 1581 setting of Potrò viver io più se senza luce is an excellent example of his style. The text questions whether life has any meaning without ‘light,’ perhaps indicating that the protagonist’s beloved has died. The speaker now longs for death and to be with God, the ‘true light.’ Marenzio emphasizes the expressive details of the text with surprising chromatic twists embedded in a dense network of motifs—a musical tapestry also found in the early Baroque works of Monteverdi.
The madrigal settings composed by Carlo Gesualdo are well known today for their extreme style: his chromatic melodies create dissonant and disjointed harmonic progressions that explore the most melancholy aspects of the dark texts he set. In Asciugate i begli occhi, Gesualdo’s use of intricate harmonic progressions and bold chromaticism underscores the emotional depth of the text, which implores the addressee to dry their tears and embrace the fleeting beauty of love.
Sarah Rimkus wrote My heart is like a singing bird for The Gesualdo Six’s first composition competition in 2016. It has remained one of the ensemble’s favorite works, in part because of its imaginative setting of words by Christina Rossetti. The two countertenors duet at the opening, setting out the melodic theme as the accompaniment gradually enters, providing a harmonic backdrop to canon above. The duet then transitions to the lowest voices, before a gradual increase in tempo and dynamic leads into the middle section. A clever device, hard to pick out aurally but evident in the score, is the strategic placement of notes for the accompanying parts, which makes the shape of a heart. As the voices gradually drop out, a single tenor note is left hanging as the work draws to a close.
O Little Rose, O Dark Rose by Canadian composer Gerda Blok-Wilson sets a poem by another Canadian, Charles Roberts. The words express a mutual love that cannot be: one is free-spirited and ‘Carmenesque,’ the other is from the ‘other side of the world’ and yearns to be with this ‘little rose’. Blok-Wilson was attracted to this poem for both its sweet and dark elements, each of which are brought out through sensitive and delicate writing, creating a piece with the timeless quality of a folk song.
The first version of Abendlied was composed in 1855 when Josef Rheinberger was just fifteen years old. It is perhaps his most famous choral work, paying homage to the great sacred music of the Renaissance with short moments of imitative writing blended with glorious homophony. The text is set primarily in a syllabic style, providing poetic clarity, with the phrase Bleib bei uns (‘Stay with us’) repeated three times as a structural anchor. As evening approaches—und der Tag hat sich geneiget (‘and the day has concluded’)—the text is passed between the voices, flowing downward from the highest voice, conjuring an image of the sun dropping lower and lower in the sky before disappearing below the horizon.