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Special offer. Johannes Ockeghem: Les chansons

Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin

Johannes Ockeghem: Les chansons

Awards:

It’s good to be prepared for the vigorous singing with close microphones. A “full-blooded vocal technique” reveals the passion and emotion inherent in these songs, which Rodin characterizes...

Special offer. Johannes Ockeghem: Les chansons

Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin

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2 CDs

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88.2 kHz, 24 bit, FLAC/ALAC/WAV

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This release includes a digital booklet

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Awards:

It’s good to be prepared for the vigorous singing with close microphones. A “full-blooded vocal technique” reveals the passion and emotion inherent in these songs, which Rodin characterizes...

About

Intimacy, intensity, passion this album explores the unfamiliar idea that fifteenth-century songs might cause us to sigh, weep, or laugh out loud. In bringing to life a world in which crying in public was not just acceptable but required, we have to take seriously the crushing despair of a line like My only sorrow is that I am not dead, or the undisguised sarcasm of This is how she chopped and cooked me up. In Johannes Ockeghem's (d. 1497) roughly two-dozen songs we find not only unparalleled compositional prowess, but feelings that range from happiness to loss, anger to despair, and bitterness to merriment. The album's all-vocal, fully texted, close-mic'd performances are rooted in a flexible, full-blooded vocal technique that aims to capture the music's technical brilliance and emotional depth.

Contents and tracklist

Awards and reviews

  • Gramophone Magazine
    Critics' Choice 2021
  • Gramophone Magazine
    January 2021
    Editor's Choice
  • Gramophone Awards
    2021
    Shortlisted - Early Music

Jan/Feb 2021

It’s good to be prepared for the vigorous singing with close microphones. A “full-blooded vocal technique” reveals the passion and emotion inherent in these songs, which Rodin characterizes individually in a seven-page note. Ockeghem is well served. Don’t pass up this monument of the early Renaissance. It is a highlight of the year.

January 2021

This is pathbreaking. Certainly Cut Circle are not the first to sing late 15th-century songs without instrumental participation...But there is something quite new about the way Cut Circle resist any kind of external contrasts to ‘vary’ the sound...tempos are perfectly judged, with lots of lovely space within the lines and between the stanzas...I think this recording sets new standards for the recording of such music and will be a model for many more to come.
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