Death of Gesualdo – St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, London

Creator and Director: Bill Barclay

Death of Gesualdo receives its world premiere at St Martin-in-the-Fields and is a treat for lovers of Carlo Gesualdo’s deeply plangent music. It’s a piece especially commissioned by The Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, The National Centre for Early Music in York and Music Before 1800 (NYC). It is created and devised by Bill Barclay, who specialises in this genre of theatrical concert.

The ever-superb Gesualdo Six, under their leader Owain Park, sing almost without a break for the entirety of the concert, immaculately in tune notwithstanding Gesualdo’s notoriously difficult chromatic language.

Visually, Death of Gesualdo has moments of wonder. Against a black backdrop, dancers from Concert Theatre Works in splendid early seventeenth-century costumes present a series of dramatic tableaux illustrating key moments in the life of the troubled composer. These tableaux come to life, using movement and mime to convey the intense emotions of the characters. But it’s the still moments that often work best. In the candlelit darkness of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the barely lit figures suggest the visual world of Caravaggio.

And so it seems strange that Barclay makes no mention of Caravaggio in his rather agonised programme essay ‘What to do with the art of odious people?’ He goes to great lengths to defend the presentation of Gesualdo’s work, to the extent of worrying about whether he should let his daughter read JK Rowling. But really, he only needs to think of Caravaggio (1571-1610), almost an exact contemporary of Gesualdo (1566-1613), to pay tribute to the aesthetic of Death of Gesualdo.

As a stage performance, Death of Gesualdo suffers from many awkwardnesses. The improvised stage itself is desperately creaky, and we are made too conscious of the six singers moving heavily about it. Lighting is obviously central to the work’s effect, so actors and singers alike are equipped with small handheld LED panels with which they are required to illuminate the figures. This device has a certain ingenuity, but tends to draw too much attention to itself, the small acting area often cluttered with moving bodies.

Gesualdo’s life certainly has its sensational moments: he killed his wife and her lover on finding them in flagrante. This is gracefully done on stage, although we might wonder why the lovers are naked, when in the scenes suggesting Gesualdo’s marriage bed and the begetting of their son, the actors remain in their voluminous costumes. The decision to include a puppet embodying the young Gesualdo is an interesting one. The sad-faced boy is shown doubled up with grief at his father’s death, but again, the mechanical issues of using puppeteers draw too much attention to the device and tend to work against the emotionality of the moment.

 Reviewed on 17 January 2026 and continues to tour