Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices - a film by Werner Herzog
"...The busy Curtis (who recently recorded Handel's Ariodante,  the first opera I ever heard him conduct, with Gauvin, and DiDonato in the title role) actually appears on screen, leading Il Complesso Barocco, in a 1995 Werner Herzog film, Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices, newly out on DVD (ArtHaus Musik). It's a film strange enough to be worthy of its supremely eccentric subject, madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613). And it takes the music seriously enough not to hide it in a soundtrack but to give it to us in full-frontal performances by Curtis and his musicians, jeans-clad and ensconced in the ruins of the castle in which Gesualdo died.Because it's Herzog, and therefore no standard-issue biopic, Death for Five Voices - also far too imaginative, even speculative, to qualify as a documentary - begins with an explanation of how the composer, after a life of sexual misadventures, probably died of an infection caused by the punitive whippings he hired a staff of 20 to administer nightly. It answers the question, was he a masochist?, with a speculative yes, noting that he also forced one of his servants (gender unspecified) to share his bed, purportedly to keep him warm. The Prince of Venosa's sexploits were famously, and infamously, with women, but South of Market offers nothing to (you should pardon the expression) top him. But Herzog and his talking heads tell it better.Today, Gesualdo is considered one of the greatest Renaissance composers, and by any estimation the greatest chromaticist before Wagner. Proof comes no more potent than the two madrigals Curtis and his singers perform. There are also performances by the Gesualdo Consort of London and, fittingly, a musical appearance by an unnamed man with a bagpipe-like instrument who comes to the castle regularly to blast out the spirit of an evil ghost.Then there's a horse." -Tim Pfaff --The Bay Area Reporter - June 17, 1010Documentary films about composers, even when they are as smoothly delivered and musically star-studded as Phil Grabsky's recent pair on Beethoven and Mozart, often have about the charm of a well-written encyclopedia article. That's why it's good news to have back in circulation this wonderfully eccentric, auteurish, and at times hilarious film on Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1630) by the German director Werner Herzog.Gesualdo's ear-bending harmonic audacity and the sheer breathless invention of his madrigals famously inspired many 20th-century composers, from Stravinsky to Alfred Schnittke. But it's also no doubt "the murky aura of criminality and obsession,'' as this DVD's liner notes put it, that has enticed many listeners to learn more about the enigmatic composer. As the young prince of Venosa, Gesualdo married his cousin Maria d'Avalos but, after catching her in the act with another lover, notoriously murdered both of them in cold blood.Made for German television in the mid-1990s, "Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices'' cannot be called a documentary in the conventional sense. Yes, Herzog taps serious-minded performers but he also stages completely invented scenes, like a surprise encounter with an itinerant bagpipe player who drenches the walls of Gesualdo's castle with music to keep the composer's evil spirit at bay. The film crew also mysteriously happens upon a woman who believes she is the reincarnation of the composer's murdered wife. In one particularly comic moment, two Italian cooks hold forth from their trattoria kitchen, analyzing the prince's supposed wedding menu, marveling at its extravagance (2,000 oysters!) while expressing horror at his murderous deeds ("He was the devil!'').Often in this film historical truth and directorial fiction feel equally strange. But Herzog's genuine passion for his subject comes through clearly. So do the fine performances of Gesualdo's madrigals by Il Complesso Barocco and the Gesualdo Consort of London. And if you have sat through a lot of sober, earnest composer documentaries, you will appreciate one that ends with the delectably absurd scene of a conductor waxing poetic on Gesualdo's music while grown men in outlandish costumes joust behind him on horseback. --Boston.com - July 4, 2010The sordid tale of a murderous prince is alluring; all the more so when the subject is also a supremely innovative composer for his time. While certainly intriguing for music aficionados, Carlo Gesualdo seems to have also left a legacy of fascination bordering on obsession for the current-day inhabitants of the village attached to his castle's ruins. In 1586, he married his beautiful cousin, Maria d'Avalos. Only a few years later, in a pre-meditated act of jealous rage, he murdered Maria and her lover and displayed their bodies first on the steps of the house, then preserved them for display in a nearby church. Being a prince, he was never prosecuted for this "crime of passion" or for subsequently killing their young son, nonetheless, he did torture himself through unrelenting flagellation for the rest of his days.Werner Herzog's movie Death for Five Voices takes his audience on a tour of this house of horrors through the eyes of colourful local inhabitants: the bagpiper who regularly flushes out evil spirits, a mad opera singer who thinks she's the reincarnation of Maria and local chefs who describe the decadent 120-course wedding feast. A few of his madrigals are performed by the Gesualdo Consort and Il Complesso Barocco led by Alan Curtis who also provides useful musical commentary. Both of these ensembles perform this difficult repertoire with its many harmonic and rhythmic twists and turns most admirably, if a bit too scholarly. The women do manage to evoke some of the sensuality of the "Three Ladies of Ferrara" that Gesulado would have certainly known from the house of his second wife Leonora d'Este (who later fled to a nunnery).I did prefer the inclusion of female voices when comparing these performances with a recent recording of Gesualdo's Madrigals Book 1 by Delitiae Musicae, an all-male ensemble led by Marco Longhini. That preference aside, this group does a superb job of conveying the sweet and painful longings inherent in texts by Guarini and Tasso made ever so much more excruciating by Gesualdo's dissonances, chromaticism and quick tonal discombobulations. The group's purity of tone and precise intonation ensures that these turns are well articulated and deeply understood.Both DVD and CD releases provide artfully crafted insights into a virtuosic but deeply disturbed individual. Gesualdo's history and his music are neither for the faint of heart nor the disingenuous. --The Whole Note, Dianne Wells