The extreme and highly individual character of Gesualdo’s music has led to some strange historical results. A revival of interest in the composer’s life and works in the 20th century produced not only a rash of novelistic treatments of his biography with sensationalist titles, but also a fascination with the chromatic aspects of his style. Yet despite the extraordinarily arbitrary quality of his music, intended no doubt as a provocation, he remained both conservative and limited as a composer. His use of chromaticism, heard at its most intense in madrigals from the later books, is a direct product of a contrapuntal technique rather than being vertically conceived. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gesualdo remained committed to the unaccompanied vocal medium, made no use of the fashionable basso continuo, and seems to have shown no interest in the new solo song. On the contrary, his language, for all its apparent waywardness, shows affinities with that of others of both the Neapolitan school (such as Pomponio Nenna) and the Ferrarese court (such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi).
This new recording gives a good selection of his work, though in curiously understated performances; it is clear from the very first track that these are brisk, no-nonsense readings. Nevertheless, the sense of commitment is evident, and the sense of ensemble good. The overall sound is decidedly choral (we are not told how many voices there are on each part), and the result has a rather old-fashioned and distinctly English feel to it This is in turn accentuated by the pronunciation, generally too restrained in its approach to consonants, and sometimes just plain wrong. Given the strength of the competition, it is doubtful that this record will find strong advocates.'