In 2005 the University of Kent organised a festival about one of my favourite filmmakers, Werner Herzog, at the Goethe Institut. I got to see a lot of his films that you could hardly ever see in the pre-Internet-Long-Tail world, including Gesualdo – Death For Five Voices
Gesualdo is a classic Herzog protagonist, combining madness in his personal life with a vision of the sublime that he just about managed to pull off. Yes, he murdered his wife, her lover, and one of his infant sons (though not by having someone push him on his swing all day and night until he expired, as Herzog's film suggests — that was what he calls the 'ecstatic truth' a.k.a. fiction a.k.a. "truth beyond facts and much deeper than facts"). But there are also Gesualdo's madrigals, some of which use wildy chromatic harmonic progressions that did not recur in Western music until the 19th century (yes, yes, I'm copying this from Wikipedia).
In the film, Herzog makes it clear that it's Gesualdo's Sixth Book of madrigals that include the really ground-breaking pieces. Other commentators seem to agree, but recordings of these works seem to be very thin on the ground. I've been unable to track down a recording of the Sixth Book in 18 months, despite having them on pre-order in Amazon's Marketplace almost all that time.
One of the pieces from this album was played just last week on Late Junction.
So, in the meantime, I got this collection (the 'complete' in the title seems to be a gross misnomer) because I saw it in the Barbican shop and it was only a fiver.
Like David Thomas and Two Pale Boys, but for different reasons, this music is best played in low light, or with your eyes closed. You can treat it as ambient soundscape, but really it requires concentrated and sustained listening.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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