Twenty years on from their acclaimed ‘Tenebrae’ recording on ECM (3/92), the Hilliard Ensemble return to Gesualdo, this time for the entire Fifth Book of Madrigals, issued at the same time as the Sixth, and embodying with it Gesualdo’s late style at its most radical. After the considerable attention the composer has received from Italian ensembles in recent years, it is interesting to compare the approach of these quintessentially English singers. Their approach is admittedly less dramatic and they’re less intent on milking the potential of every dissonance. Related to that last point, there’s also far less rubato, though one can hardly accuse them of playing it entirely straight. The emphasis is placed more squarely on the pieces’ trajectories than on the scrunchy details; so, nearer La Venexiana, shall we say, than to Concerto Italiano.

Here the quartet is augmented by the countertenor David Gould and the soprano Monika Mauch, whose voice in particular lends a brightness that may surprise the group’s many devotees in this repertoire. This works wonders in the lighter pieces (there are some), like ‘Occhi del mio cor’, though a slightly lower pitch in the darker ones (for instance the centrally placed, magnificent ‘Mercè grido’) might have given us the best of both worlds. Tuning is notoriously tricky in late Gesualdo but his fierce chromaticisms are confidently handled (much more so than in the Hilliards’ reading of Lassus’s Prophetiae Sybillarum – 9/98). And as to tuning perfect chords, try the cry of ‘gridando’ near the end of ‘Tu m’uccidi, o crudele’: positively luminous. The Hilliards seem to have found a new lease of life recently. Why indeed not search for dark light in this most paradoxical music?