Festival review: Death of Gesualdo, Queen’s Hall, five stars

Vocal ensemble Gesualdo Six first collaborated with director Bill Barclay and Concert Theatre Works for Secret Byrd, exploring the perilous Elizabethan environment around composer William Byrd in a promenade performance that recently animated St John’s Kirk during the Perth Festival of the Arts.

Their follow-up, about the dramatic life of the Italian composer whose music the group was formed to sing, is different in the more passive engagement required of the audience and stylistically, with six actors and a puppeteer joining the vocalists onstage. Their vocabulary of melodramatic gesture and freeze-frame tableaux vivant might be familiar from Lecoq-trained Fringe artists but the combination with the flawless acapella singing of Owain Park’s sextet was unique.

Gesualdo is notorious for having murdered his first wife and her lover when he caught them In Flagrante Delicto, and that pivotal moment is memorably rendered in snap-shots and the actors’ only utterances. It is mirrored in the staging of the composer’s own demise, returning us to the picture of his death-bed with which the show began.

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The flash-back narration opens with an image just as startling of the young Gesualdo levitating from the corpse, the appealing puppet of the boy designed to pull the audience on-side.

Exquisitely costumed by Arthur Oliver, the compact production is designed to work in small venues, probably often re-purposed churches, with pocket-size lighting on stands and in the hands of the singers and transformations achieved behind a screen or the six choristers.

Their perfectly-balanced performance over more than an hour is a marvel. The soundtrack is effectively through-composed, using the composer’s music in sometimes surprising ways, sung in Latin with excellent English supertitles. In particular Gesualdo’s devotional work is mapped onto his life with his betrayal paralleled with that of Christ by Judas. What the programme sheet calls the “toxic proximity to the papacy” of the composer’s family is the start of a spiritual journey that is as heathen as it is Roman Catholic.

It is unfortunate that this was Death of Gesualdo’s only EIF outing, because there is no shortage of appropriate venues, including the Festival’s own home at The Hub, where a run of performances would surely have attracted more packed houses like this one.

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