Concerto Grosso

For several years, Sally Beamish worked on ideas for an opera with playwright David Pownall, based on his play Music to Murder By, which is about the 16th-century Italian prince and murderer, Don Carlo Gesualdo. History relates that he arranged for his unfaithful wife and her lover to be murdered. By contrast, he also happened to be a prolific composer of madrigals, having six books of them published.

Beamish initially built a guitar piece around one of his more extraordinary madrigals, and described how `the strange resonances of his music continue to surface in my mind, leading me to use two of his madrigals and a sacred motet as the basis of this Concerto Grosso.'

The piece is in five movements. The first two and the last two being pairs of `slow-fast' and the central movement, an Adagio, drawn directly from the first of the `Responsorien' - `In Monte Oliveti'. The first two movements use material from one of Gesualdo's best known madrigals, `Moro Lasso' - the harmony and rhythmic figurations are strongly influenced by his chromaticism and idiosyncrasies. The fourth movement refers back to this sound-world, and leads into the fifth which waves a strongly characterized `concerto grosso'-style movement around rhythmic fragments taken from a lighter madrigal `Or che in gioia'.

Concerto Grosso was commissioned by the BT Scottish Ensemble, and first performed in Dundee on 1st January 1993.

Sally Beamish