O vos omnes by Carlo Gesualdo.
Composer Donna McKevitt creates an entirely original work from The Marian Consort's recording of the motet.
The Marian Consort: vocal ensemble
Originally released on Delphian Records as part of Gesualdo: Sacrae Cantiones (Catalogue No. DCD34176).
https://www.delphianrecords.com/

Nearly five minutes is all it takes. Donna McKevitt's new single, released yesterday on Delphian Records, takes a single motet and turns it into something entirely its own.

Few Renaissance composers still speak to us as urgently as Carlo Gesualdo, whose harmonic daring and emotional rawness sound startlingly modern four centuries on. That is exactly the quality McKevitt has tapped into with O vos.

Her method is unusual: rather than arranging Gesualdo's O vos omnes in any conventional sense, McKevitt works from a specific performance of it — The Marian Consort's recording, made for Delphian's Gesualdo: Sacrae Cantiones — and treats that recording itself as her instrument. Phrases are looped, pulled apart and reassembled beneath newly written cello lines and a low electronic pulse, so the original singing becomes less a source to be adapted than clay to be shaped.

The piece has its roots in a longer collaboration. The Marian Consort commissioned McKevitt back in 2020, and when she later suggested building new pieces from recordings the ensemble already had in its catalogue, it was O vos omnes that stopped her in her tracks.

"The opening phrase had a hypnotic quality when repeated," she explains. "I began building an entirely new piece around it, bringing in other sections of the motet to create moments of dissonance. It felt less like composing with individual notes than with musical cells."

That description holds up on listening. The writing is spare by design — McKevitt has spoken of wanting something minimalist yet dense with texture and dissonance — but the effect is anything but thin. Pitch and balance in the vocal layers are first class, and the whole thing casts a real spell: hypnotic, immersive, and hard to switch off halfway through.

It lands somewhere unusual, neither straightforwardly Renaissance nor straightforwardly electronic, but genuinely both at once. After a run of recent releases leaning on electronic textures, few have used them this hauntingly. Worth five minutes of anyone's time.