Gesualdo at the @hollandfestival: a hell of a match made in heaven.

Pizza Napolitana is not going to taste the same again. After all, mozzarella can be anything. We owe this enrichment of our lives to De Warme Winkel, the anarchic theatre company hired by the Netherlands Chamber Choir to enhance their Holland Festival programme. We knew it. And you can go and check that out for yourself, because after those few - scarily sold-out - performances at the Holland Festival, it will probably return elsewhere. At Festival Boulevard, for instance.

The Netherlands Chamber Choir is world-class, and by now we must also note that of The Warm Shop. But different. Their two worlds couldn't be further apart. That of the classical recital and that of the sometimes ramshackle stands at venues and in small venues. That they meet through Carlo Gesualdo's Madrigals is, well, a match made in heaven. Or in hell, actually.

Monster

Carlo Gesualdo (1566 - 1613) was a monster. But a monster who left us the most beautiful music imaginable. Music, it turns out, that was not even meant for our ears. He liked to keep it, like his atrocities, private. And what were those atrocities? A passion killing carried out with a little too much passion on his wife and her lover, plus something involving a baby. And, for the nature lovers among us, something to do with a forest, which rustled too loudly, and therefore disturbed him in his sacred work of composition. Although the latter seems to be nuanced: he was mostly afraid that vengeful enemies could lurk there.

All wikipedia facts, which we are now served up in the barely two-hour-long performance simply titled Gesualdo. Because, of course, that's a bit of the problem with a historical fete story: you can tell the facts, play the music and then you're pretty much there. You can also depict the facts, and so in this case that would make for a dracula-like horror film. You can also leave it to The Warm Shop, and then you get a nightmare.

Variety

But so a wonderful nightmare, for which there are actually some laughs, too. It begins a bit as you might fear. We see Ward Weemhoff, an actor perfectly cast for the role of the swaggering genius Gesualdo, giving a drum solo on a drum set of buttocks and bellies, which, depending on the way he strokes them, chatter nicely or shout "ouch!". The merry SM drum solo is wheeled away and the chorus comes on, does its - unworldly beautiful - thing, chorus gone, scene with the actors (and lots of carnality).

This alternation goes on for a while. So long that you start to think that the actors and singers have never met in real life, and even behind the scenes, and that the chorus members don't even know what all those actors are doing on that stage between their heavenly music. Until the moment, later in the performance, when everything comes together beautifully and the banal horror of the actors effortlessly matches the icy divinity of the singers.

Ultimate beauty

The performance is structured like a nightmare, in which images recur, are repeated, degenerate. There is humour in it, and this is necessary because the horror and the pain, which can also be felt live, would otherwise get too bad. The sacred music is desecrated but remains intact, as do some of the carnal ingredients of the performance (something to do with pizza, that is).

What also remains intact is the mystery. Ultimate beauty we often experience on the verge of death. Whether that is the great death, or the small, proverbial death, that of sexual orgasm. Do we find Gesualdo's compositions beautiful because the music unmistakably makes us feel the agitated madness of a monstrous killer? Probably. Just as we go to the edge of a fathomless abyss to have the most beautiful view.

Le vent l'emportera

Or why I still find every work by Bertrand Cantat (Le vent l'emportera) horrifyingly beautiful, perhaps even more so because you know that this agitated madness in his music once led to the murder of his girlfriend.

We're weird, and this show, precisely because of that extreme combination of people and styles, shows that beautifully.