Luminescence Chamber Singers: Gesualdo Tenebrae
Sat, 29 Mar
|Wesley Uniting Church
Join Luminescence for an evening of Gesualdo Tenebrae.
Time & Location
29 Mar 2025, 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Wesley Uniting Church, 20-22 National Circuit, Entrance via, Fitzroy St, Forrest ACT 2603, Australia
About the event
"There is something deeply troubling and inscrutable in Gesualdo’s music, something that any listener, even the most inexpert one, will unfailingly experience. This most particularly holds for Tenebrae responsoria (1611), his definitive statement, his monument, his testament. It is as if this work, firmly embedded in the framework of liturgy for the Holy Week and reaching back to the practices of the Gregorian chant, would constantly extend over its boundaries and transgress its time and setting, immediately addressing modernity, disturbing all the rules in a severe tension, reaching into something that borders on chaos and madness, within the very order and religious devotion it fully espouses….”
Mladen Dolar, Out of Joint (2020)
More than 400 years later, the music of Carlo Gesualdo still seems strikingly avant-garde. Composed for his own private use during his final years, and likely unheard during his lifetime, Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories are of unmatched intensity. This…