A dramatic staging of Carlo Gesualdo's life and music, combining the vocal music of The Gesualdo Six with actors and puppetry.
The Gesualdo Six bring Death of Gesualdo to Turner Sims on Tuesday 20 October, starting at 19:30. It's a dramatic staging of the life and music of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, a Renaissance composer whose musical brilliance was overshadowed by his infamy for murdering his wife and her lover. The vocal group shares the stage with six actors and ground-breaking puppetry, and the whole thing is put together by Concert Theatre Works.
Bill Barclay created and directed the show, and he's formerly the director of music at Shakespeare's Globe. This follows his 2025 collaboration Secret Byrd, and it draws its imagery directly from Renaissance painting, with the singers and actors forming tableaux vivant that superimpose Gesualdo's psyche onto his music. The score runs 75 minutes and weaves together the Tenebrae Responsories, the mass he wrote for his own death, and madrigals from books 4, 5 and 6. Choreography is by Will Tuckett and puppetry by Janni Younge.
It's not a new piece. It was commissioned by St Martin-in-the-Fields to mark its 300th anniversary, and it's also premiered at The National Centre for Early Music in York and Music Before 1800 in New York. The Guardian called it "a creepy juxtaposition of beauty and horror, like the music of Gesualdo itself," and Richard Morrison of The Times described it as "a cut above anything that's gone before."
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Tickets are split into bands: Band A is £45 (£40.50 for Friends), Band B is £40 (£36 Friends), and Band C is £20 (£18 Friends). Students and under-18s pay £10 for Bands B and C, and school groups are £10. It starts at 19:30 at Turner Sims.
