Music / Luminescence Chamber Singers. At RMC Chapel, Duntroon, March 14. Reviewed by NICK HORN.

Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), Prince of Venosa in southern Italy, was a vicious and deeply disturbed human being.

He gruesomely murdered his first wife and her lover in flagrante. But he also wrote amazing music that continues to surprise and shock. We heard a terrific performance at the RMC Chapel of the central section of his masterpiece, the Responsories for Holy Week (Tenebrae), devoted to Good Friday: nine sacred songs (in Latin) viscerally representing Christ’s betrayal, isolation and suffering in the week of his crucifixion.

Canberra’s Luminescence performed these challenging unaccompanied works with commitment, artistry and an exceptional sense of vocal ensemble. The group comprises AJ America (mezzo soprano), Lucien Fisher (baritone), Lachlan McDonald (baritone), Rachel Mink (soprano), Alasdair Stretch (bass-baritone) and Dan Walker (tenor).

Off-stage music director Roland Peelman presented a pre-concert talk lucidly explaining the cultural and religious context of these bizarre compositions.

The form of the program echoed that of the three Matins Good Friday services for which the works were composed, with three sets of three responsories interpolated with plainchant (Psalm 21 and passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah). The chant, by individual male singers, offered salutary relief from the contorted choral texture of the songs.

After Walker and McDonald’s beautifully delivered antiphon of the psalm, the ensemble let loose with a gorgeous, full-throated, open vocal chord to announce the initial responsory, All My Friends Have Deserted Me. We were quickly pulled into the drama of slipping and sliding tones and tonalities recreating Christ’s sense of anger and despair at his betrayal by those nearest to him.

The responsories are essentially sacred madrigals, in which a kaleidoscope of emotions are represented in quicksilver passages of polyphony (interlocking vocal lines) and sudden chordal homophony, and by bizarre changes of key, chromaticism and dissonance, all at the service of the text rather than the formalist symmetry of the High Renaissance.

The tearing of the temple veil is embodied in ragged downward phrases; a sudden cacophony represents lions in the forest assembled like Christ’s enemies to devour him. And as Luminescence sang that the whole earth shook, the ensemble was drowned out by the sound of a jet plane passing over the chapel that might have been scripted by a modern Gesualdo.

The singers changed dynamic on a coin in passages such as Remember me, Lord. The high female and tenor voices alternated effectively with the lower ensemble, with Strange’s bass-baritone rumbling along underneath. They were in constant communication, using eyes, hands and bodies, tossing motifs around the group, waiting for paired entries to create a sense of anticipation for what was around the next corner. At times one wished for Mink’s lighter soprano to cut through more to balance America’s powerful vocal tone, and in the chant sections a more resonant acoustic would contribute more warmth.

But the ensemble remained tight, maintaining pure tone and tuning to the end in a remarkably sustained and energetic performance.