Carlo Gesualdo

COMPOSING tends to be a solitary occupation, and for many it’s an uneventful one, consigned to quiet rooms and careful thought. But then you get somebody like Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th-century Italian master whose life was as shockingly full of incident as his often disconcerting music. And together they’re the basis for an immersive, dramatised concert in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Jan 16 & 17.

Gesualdo was a nobleman of less than noble disposition, probably a psychopath, who murdered his wife and her lover in a gory manner and may well have dispatched others besides. He was certainly someone you wouldn’t have wanted to meet on a bad day with a knife. But he was also one of the great creative geniuses of his era, whose music speaks with a brilliance and anguish inescapably suggestive of a tortured mind.

It’s the conundrum of this dazzling darkness that the eponymously named Gesualdo Six, will explore in St Martin’s crypt – where they’ve done something like it before, re-enacting the circumstances in which William Byrd’s Mass settings were performed in Tudor times when the Catholic Mass was outlawed and priests, if caught, paid with their lives.

Having experienced this re-enactment, I can vouch that it was impressively done, although not for those of nervous disposition. It will be the same with Gesualdo. So be warned. stmartin-in-the-fields.org

• Meanwhile, the celebrated Academy of St Martin in the Fields gives its next concert, Jan 20, not at St Martin’s but at Cadogan Hall. Led by Joshua Bell, it features him in Brahms’ violin concerto alongside a new one by American composer Kevin Puts: not yet a big name in the UK, though he wrote a magnificently rhapsodic opera, The Hours, that played to rave reviews in New York and is overdue a British premiere. cadoganhall.com

• Another violinist of note is the live-wire act that’s Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who will take your breath away in Bartok’s 2nd Violin Concerto with the LSO, Barbican, Jan 18. barbican. org.uk – and talking of the LSO, its home-base LSO St Luke’s has a chamber concert based around Vaughan Williams and his Circle, Jan 22, in which the Nash Ensemble play VW alongside Rebecca Clarke and Elisabeth Maconchy. lso.co.uk

For good measure, the Nash Ensemble are busy this week with another event, Jan 17 at Wigmore Hall, where they play music by Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge. Also at the Wigmore, Jan 20, is arguably the finest living exponent of German Lieder, Christian Gerhaher, singing Schubert. It’s advertising as sold out but you might be lucky. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• Aurora Orchestra were in the news last week with the announcement that their manager is about to leave and run the LSO. But this most resourceful of bands will survive it. And they’re at Kings Place, Jan 17, with a crazily mixed programme featuring the Australian conductor/composer Brett Dean with his daughter, mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean. kingsplace.co.uk

• Finally, the Temple Singers start their new year at Temple Church with Frank Martin’s impactful Mass for Double Choir and Eric Whitacre’s Saint-Chappelle, which imagines a young girl entering the Parisian chapel and being overwhelmed by the glowing majesty of its stained glass. Something she wouldn’t be in Temple Church whose glowing windows vanished in the Blitz and have been relatively austere ever since. templemusic.org