What
an incredible story behind a person like
Gesualdo
da
Venosa.
Composer,
singer,
great
hunter,
arts
protector,
noble and murderess.
His “character”
survived to history, today
he would
be
the
subject of
a
Hollywood movie,
maybe
he would appear
on
talk shows or reality tv.
Other
times,
an other
society, in
which
life
was
worth
less
than now,
and where matters
were regulated
by
the blaze of a sword.
But
if
the man is
vile
matter
whose
flesh
is
corrupted,
the artist and
his art
continue
to live
in
our time,
inspiring other
artists and
other
events.
This
is his
story
of this
famous
composer.
Renowned
not
only for
his
great qualities
as
a composer
and
musical
innovator,
but also for the
premeditated murder
of
his wife and
her
lover.
At
twenty
he
married his cousin
Maria
D`Avalos,
four years older than him,
who
gave
him
a
son.
Totally
absorbed
by
his music
and
his passion
for
hunting,
however,
he
neglected
his
wife, who
had
a reckless
love
affair
with
Fabrizio
Carafa,
Duke of Andria,
married
and father of
four
children.
Wounded
in
honor,
Gesualdo
made his bloody revenge:
October
16, 1590
he said he would leave
for
a
two
days
hunting, except
back
in
the night and
catch
the
two lovers
in
the
act of adultery
in
his bedroom
and
killed
them both.
To
escape
the revenge of
Carafa,
he fled from
Naples
refuge
in
his castle of
Gesualdo,
where he lived for
seventeen years,
transforming the castle
into
a sumptuous
place,
a friendly home to
the
most famous musicians
and
great
personalities
like
Torquato
Tasso.
The
French
guitarist
Noël
Akchoté
not
new
to
this type of
rework,
decided in
2011
to
reinterpret
his
sublime
madrigals for
five
guitars, bringing a
breath of freshness
and
newness
to
these
compositions
from
the
eternal
character.
In
this
enterprise
Akchoté
is
accompanied by
four
other
guitarists:
David
Grubs,
Adam Levy,
Doug
Wamblew
and
Julien
Desprez.
The
solution adopted by
Akchoté
is
to leave
as
much as
possible
intact
the melodies
of the polyphonic
madrigals
by
Gesualdo,
without
arranging
the
scores rather than
adapting
the
guitar quintet
with
open
tunings
not
only
to stay
in
the
pitch range
defined
by
the original compositions
but
to
permit the guitars to play as possible freeing the
sustain
of
their strings.
In
the booklet
that
accompanies the
CD,
which
has
been produced now by
Drag
City label,
in spite of these
pieces
are
available
in
mp3 format
since
2011
Akchoté
also
explains the
choice
of
playing
as
much as possible
in
the
first position
in
the instrument
leaving
notes
flowing freely,
also
adopting
a
warmer sound.
The
result is
a
haunting cd.
Its
beauty
is
twofold,
on
the one hand
the
revival
of
this music
in
a different key
suave,
on the other the extreme
fineness
and
cleanliness
of the
tone
of these
electric
guitars.
A
simply
sublime
record.
I
hope
that
the other
works
of
Akchoté
based
on
the music of
Orlande
de
Lassus,
Giovanni
Pierluigi
da
Palestrina,
Guillaume
de
Machaut
and
John
Cage
will
soon find some other nice recording labels.
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