Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566-1613), is remembered for two things. As a composer he produced collections of madrigals and motets that explore a harmonic language extreme not only for its time but unmatched for the next 250 years. Secondly, he is known to have murdered his first wife and her lover after discovering them in flagrante delicto; some sources charge him also with killing the child whose paternity he now doubted, as well as his outraged father-in-law.
Conceived and staged by John La Bouchardière, and described as a “polyphonic crime drama”, Betrayal follows on from The Full Monteverdi, his earlier collaboration with the Renaissance specialist vocal ensemble I Fagiolini and their musical director, Robert Hollingworth. Six singers and six dancers take part in what is essentially a piece of immersive music-theatre, pairing off to form individual dramatic units scattered around the darkened venue, each operating in a space at whose centre is one of those chalk outlines of a body, familiar from crime scenes.
singers Kirsty Hopkins and Simon Palmer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/for the Guardian
Around the walls are blackboards to which are attached photographs of individuals and objects (including weapons), as well as the translated texts of the madrigals and motets, which are otherwise unavailable to the audience. This is a pity, because the 17 items, sung either in Italian or Latin, comment obliquely on the action, and unless you happen to be familiar with them or know those languages well, their meaning will be lost. (Programmes containing texts and translations are handed out only at the end.) In between the boards are other artefacts evoking the crime – a mattress and some bedding, an upturned table, a basket of toys.
Choreography is credited to the company, and regularly consists of movement conveying either intimacy or violence: here a female singer cuts her partner’s throat, there a male singer strangles his lover, while elsewhere a hammer lies in a small pool of blood next to a prone body. These suggestive visuals are clearly not intended to supply an entire narrative, but rather to present fragmentary images redolent of Gesualdo’s life and his notorious crime.
As with all immersive productions, what you see depends on where you are – though it’s possible to station yourself on the border between two groups and sample both at once. Taken as a whole, the result is undoubtedly stronger on atmosphere than coherence, though the musical fabric holds up remarkably well, given the distance between the singers and their intense physical involvement with the drama.
Until 15 May. That evening’s 8.30pm performance will be live streamed at theguardian.com/classical. Touring until 5 June.
