by Paul Matheson

‘Radiant Dawn’ by The Gesualdo Six, directed by Owain Park (Hyperion Records CDA68465)

The new recording from The Gesualdo Six is their tenth album, and it displays both a continuity with their previous work and a departure from it.

The familiar theme is the poetic and theological fascination with light: heaven’s light, eternal light, daybreak and dusk. Composers over the centuries have risen to the challenge of painting with music the intimations of immortality that we receive from the Creator in the numinous, crepuscular light of the gloaming or in the first gentle fingers of the light of dawn. The exploration of those themes were the preoccupations of The Gesualdo Six’s previous albums ‘Lux Aeterna’ (reviewed in Open House in October 2024) and ‘Fading’ (reviewed in Open House in October 2021).

Trumpet

The new element in this recording is the decision to collaborate with an instrumentalist who acts as an additional ‘voice’. The virtuoso trumpet player Matilda Lloyd appears on 8 of the 15 tracks on this album. The trumpet is the musical instrument that traditionally plays the forlorn-sounding last post, as the flag is lowered at sunset or as a body is laid to rest in the grave. It is an apt choice of instrument to assist in the task of communicating light through sound. Brass instruments are often referred to as ‘horns’, and when the trumpet sounds a steady, sustained note it is richly redolent of the ancient, plaintive sound of the medieval hunting-horn. It is that plangent, keening sound that the trumpet so often channels in these collaborations with The Gesualdo Six. It is a sound that evokes the hunting horn calling the riders home at the end of day, or the climax of the medieval poem ‘The Song of Roland’, where Roland sounds his horn to summon Charlemagne’s Christian army to the defence of the Holy Roman Empire.

Paul Matheson is a policy advisor on equality, human rights and standards in public life.