An aristocrat who forged an idiosyncratic style of musical expression, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa was the creator of a bold, new harmonic language, and a composer truly ahead of his time. A founder of his own academy, to which many leading madrigalists of the 16th and early 17th centuries belonged, Gesualdo (1560 - 1613) was a highly expressive composer, as well as a virtuoso performer on the bass lute. Yet his chromatic progressions baffled his contemporaries and had to wait until the 19th-century High Romantic period to find artistic parallels. Among his most important compositions are six books of five-part madrigals dating from between 1594 and 1611. The last two books in particular - this recording by the Hilliard Ensemble brings new performances of Book 5 - display his dissonant musical language with its extreme harmonic disruptions, striking tempo contrasts and a distinctly modern feel for drama. Gesualdo"s music has been part of The Hilliard Ensemble"s performing life for more than two decades. The British vocal group"s 1990 recording of the Tenebrae Responsories, which won awards including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, is now widely regarded a reference recording of the work. Through the years, the Hilliards have kept the Responsories in their concert repertoire. As baritone singer Gordon Jones notes, "With such highly-charged, mannered music you wonder sometimes how much repetition it can bear but, for us, Gesualdo has stood the test of time. Audiences never seem to tire of these dramatic musical tableaux and for the performers the technical and musical challenges seem constantly fresh. This continuing relationship with Gesualdo"s music led us, a few years ago, to look in detail at what other of his works we might perform... Eventually a desire for completeness overtook us and we decided to see if we could tackle the entire Fifth Book of Madrigals. The whole collection constitutes a gallery of dramatically lit portraits of human emotions with a heavy emphasis on the extremes of joy and despair." For this recording, realized at Propstei St. Gerold in November 2009, the Hilliard quartet of David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, Steven Harrold and Gordon Jones was augmented by soprano Monika Mauch and second countertenor David Gould, both of whom have a history with the group. Gould appears on the groups albums of Bach Motets and Guillaume de Machaut Motets. Mauch, meanwhile, sang with the Hilliards on the highly successful Bach `reconstruction" album "Morimur", based on the research of Helga Thoene.