Bruckner & Gesualdo: Echoing across the centuries

Anton Bruckner was born 200 years ago this year. To hear his choral music with fresh ears, we have placed his celebrated a cappella motets together with unlikely bedfellows, above all the sacred motets of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613).

Richard Wagner was one of Bruckner’s musical heroes, and in his motets Bruckner manages to distil a hyper-romantic and highly expressive idiom into a compact form which otherwise eluded both of them.

250 years earlier, Gesualdo was experimenting with ear- and mind-bending chromatic expressionism and enharmonic shifts in a remarkably similar way. Both Bruckner and Gesualdo were outsiders, were strongly led by their Catholic faith, and showed signs of mental instability. The tormented passion of their music seems to reach out across the centuries.

“The Monteverdi Choir, led by Jonathan Sells...proves its extraordinary class.”

Leipziger Volkszeitung