In 2026, Bill Barclay and The Gesualdo Six reunite for a major new tour to follow-up their international hit collaboration, Secret Byrd.
DEATH OF GESUALDO is a theatrical concert fusing music, puppetry, and tableau vivant.
In this staged concert, The Gesualdo Six are joined by six dancers choreographed by Will Tuckett whose credits include new work for Royal Ballet, English National Ballet and Royal Shakespeare Company. The dancers enact stunning tableaux vivant, filled with iconography taken directly from Renaissance painting, to superimpose Gesualdo’s psyche onto his most chilling music.
The result will be the boldest look yet at how the life and music of this enigmatic prodigy must function together for the true Gesualdo to emerge from the shadows. What do we do with the art of monstrous people?
Touring the UK in London and York, in the US in NYC, and with more dates to be announced for 2026.
Upcoming Tour Dates
London, UK: St Martin-in-the-Fields
Friday 16 January 2026 at 7pm • Tickets
Saturday 17 January 2026 at 7pm • Tickets
York, UK: National Centre for Early Music
Sunday 18 January 2026 at 6.30pm • Tickets
Monday 19 January 2026 at 6.30pm • Tickets
New York, USA: St. John the Divine
Friday 13 February 2026 at 7.30pm • Tickets
Further dates to be announced.
About the Music
The music of Carlo Gesualdo has always been a cornerstone of our repertoire, starting with his extraordinary Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday, which we performed at our first concert. Gesualdo’s music is well known for its extreme style, with chromatic melodies creating dissonant and disjointed harmonic progressions that illuminate the most melancholy aspects of the dark texts he set.
Gesualdo is often portrayed as a radical in a conventional field, but it was composers such as Monteverdi who forged a new path and stitched the seams between the Renaissance and Baroque. The Responsories show Gesualdo’s adherence to the old, ‘Mannerist’ style, full of profuse exaggeration and dramatic hyperbole, yet confined to a polyphonic framework. He had taken all the elements as far as they would go, and so it is even more remarkable that the resulting music is a canvas of vivid colours and textures in which the most simple and poignant moments shine through.
Music is selected by Bill Barclay, drawing from Tenebrae, the mass Gesualdo wrote for his own death, and his most fascinating madrigals from books 4, 5, and 6. A new score is created with Gesualdo’s finest works, through-sung in a 75-minute rhapsody of one of the most fascinating and infamous characters in music history.
Commissioned by St Martin-in-the-Fields to mark its 300th anniversary. Co-commissioned by The National Centre for Early Music (York) and Music Before 1800 (NYC).
Produced by Concert Theatre Works
Created & Directed by Bill Barclay
Choreography by Will Tuckett
Music Direction by Owain Park
Costumes by Arthur Oliver
Generously sponsored by Michael Katz