I Fagiolini: Betrayal

Following on from their sensational play and film The Full Monteverdi, Oxford-based early music vocalists I Fagiolini return with Betrayal: A Polyphonic Crime Drama. Based in the dusky tunnels of Village Underground, Betrayal is an immersive, site-specific work of theatre. It follows the life of the incomparable late Renaissance composer Gesualdo, using some of his most charged and discomforting music to retell the story of his life.

Since its foundation in 1986, I Fagiolini has become one of Europe’s premier ensembles for medieval, Renaissance and contemporary vocal music. Their 2011 recording of Striggio’s 40 Part Mass won the Gramophone award for early music. John La Bouchardière, director of The Full Monteverdi, will helm the production.

No name in the history of Western music can claim the infamy of Carlo Gesualdo. The Prince of a small Italian commune, throughout his early years he seemed interested in nothing but music. Then, in 1590, at about the age of thirty, everything changed – while in Naples, he caught his wife entwined with her lover. In a fit of rage, he brutally murdered them both. Immune to prosecution due to his princely status but liable to be attacked by vengeful relatives, he fled to his castle in Venosa. He seldom left; instead, he hired musicians and devoted himself to his art.

The music he composed in these declining years is among the most sublime ever written. It’s also among the strangest, and the most intensely emotional, no less dramatic than Gesualdo’s life. Often scored for small groups of voices, it employs wild dissonance and juxtaposes seemingly mismatched rhythms. Single words – ‘agony,’ ‘death,’ ‘ecstasy’ – are repeatedly reworked, suggesting a mind wracked by guilt. Its chromatic progressions remained unique in Western music until the end of the nineteenth century, and it sounds remarkably modern. This is music at both its most devastating psychological and breathtakingly empyreal.