CARLO GESUALDO/DAVID CHEVALLIER: Gesualdo Variations: Les Madrigaux Imaginaires du Prince Assassin – Christophe Monniot, saxophones / Guillaume Roy, viola / Dominique Pifarély, violin /David Chevallier, guitars / members of A Sei Voci – Zig-Zag Territoires ZZT100202 [Dist. by Harmonia mundi], 41:22 **1/2:
Italian nobleman and composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) is one of those unfortunates whose biography almost overwhelmed his artistic contributions. Almost. Because Gesualdo’s music is so radical, centuries had to elapse before its merits were recognized, and today Gesualdo is considered one of the greatest of madrigalists. But Gesualdo’s lurid biography is still visited regularly by filmmakers and operaticians. With the help of servants, he murdered his unfaithful wife and her lover and was rumored to have killed again, possibly his son by this same wife and/or her father, though the rumors have never been substantiated.
Apparently, Gesualdo’s biography colored his music making since increasingly the texts he chose for his madrigals obsessed over the agonies of love. Matching these texts, his music became increasingly torturous in terms of harmony and rhythm; Gesualdo’s dissonant, highly chromatic style was centuries ahead of its time.
Enter David Chevallier, a classically trained guitarist with a taste for jazz and its improvisatory style. Amid a number of other projects that cross-pollinate the worlds of classical and pop music, Chevallier recalled the impact that hearing Gesualdo had had on him and so turned to the madrigals from Books 5 and 6 as the source for his Gesualdo Variations.
The Variations are in the tradition of other postmodernist works that freely reinterpret or reimagine older music. Luciano Berio’s Rendering, based on Schubert symphony fragments, or Hans Zender’s Winterreise, again using Schubert as the springboard, come immediately to mind. If you want to understand Chevallier’s motives and expectations further, I’m afraid the rather opaque and grandiloquent notes to the recording won’t help:
Over and above the amplification of pre-existing potentialities, David Chevallier also makes use of confrontation. The numerous Baroque dissonances represent a disparity which must be resolved. They are here confronted with the distortion and stridency which Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane regarded as the very matter of their music. In similar fashion, the trance rhythm which rock and jazz have borrowed from Africa encounters the agogics of the madrigals, modeled on the declamation of the words. The writing of David Chevallier and the improvisations of the instrumentalists also allow themselves to be contaminated by the fundamental component of Baroque aesthetic. They let themselves be guided and inspired by the rhythms and inflections of the Italian language, with which the guitarist enjoys a privileged relationship.
Did you get that? No, I didn’t either. But I appreciate that given his jazz and rock proclivities, Chevallier delegates a good deal of his compositional responsibilities to the improvisations of his instrumental forces, including his own riffs on the electric and acoustic guitars. And yes, they are often strident, maybe in the style of Hendrix and Coltrane—I’m not enough of a devotee to aver that this is so. These improvisational passages actually provide some of the more interesting moments in the Variations. Ironically, I find that the pop-musical delivery of the singers from A Sei Voci and the instrumental backup to them have a tendency to cushion the blow, taking much of the edge off Gesualdo’s thorny vocal writing. The cool syncopations and the cool, cool crooning of the sax and chording of the guitar add a jazz-club suavity to the music that “confronts” Gesualdo’s music in a way I find lacking, if not altogether wrongheaded. The musicianship on display is proficient to the nth degree, and some of the results as I say are quite interesting, but overall, this is not my cup of espresso.
The recording is close up and high level, like a typical jazz or rock studio job. I had to cut back on the volume to save my ears but found that some of the instrumental accompaniment lost its punch when I did so. If you’re used to listening to pop recordings, you might react more favorably than I did. But for most listeners, a pass on these Gesualdo Variations in favor of the genuine article is probably the best bet.
-Lee Passarella
