Ockeghem - Complete Songs Vol.1 | Blue Heron BHCD1010

Ockeghem - Complete Songs Vol.1

£13.25

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Label: Blue Heron

Cat No: BHCD1010

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 3rd January 2020

Contents

About

One year after winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music for the fifth disc in its series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks (BHCD1007) and just one month after releasing the world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s I madrigali a cinque voci (BHCD1009, 2 CDs), Blue Heron announces the release of the first in a new series of recordings dedicated to the music of Johannes Ockeghem and his contemporaries. Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs, vol.1 is the first of two discs which will present all of Ockeghem’s songs in a complete set; the second is planned for release in 2022. The songs have not been recorded complete since the early 1980s.

Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497) was one of the most celebrated musicians of the fifteenth century and is one of the greatest composers of all time, every bit the equal of J.S. Bach in contrapuntal technique and profound expressivity, and like Bach able to combine the most rigorous intellectual structure with a beguiling sensuality. His two dozen songs set French lyric poetry in the courtly forms of the fifteenth century – rondeau, virelai, and ballade – to exquisitely crafted polyphony in which all voices are granted equally beautiful and compelling melodies.

Besides eleven of Ockeghem’s songs, the disc includes two related works: the anonymous En atendant vostre venue from the recently-discovered Leuven Chansonnier (probably copied c. 1475 in the Loire Valley, where Ockeghem lived and worked), whose text borrows the first line of Ockeghem’s Quant de vous seul, and Au travail suis by the composer Barbingant, which quotes both text and music from the opening of Ockeghem’s Ma maistresse. The CD booklet contains complete texts and translations and notes on the music and performance practice by Sean Gallagher (musicological adviser for Blue Heron’s project to perform the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem in a series of thirteen concert programmes, Ockeghem@600) and Blue Heron’s music director Scott Metcalfe.

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