Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering. Part of the power of this production comes from the heretical frisson that in this Read more ...