Special offer. Johannes Ockeghem: Les chansons
Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin
Awards:
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Gramophone Magazine, July 2026, Critics' Choice 2021
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Gramophone Magazine, January 2021, Editor's Choice
-
Gramophone Awards, 2021, Shortlisted - Early Music
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
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Gramophone Magazine, July 2026, Critics' Choice 2021
-
Gramophone Magazine, January 2021, Editor's Choice
-
Gramophone Awards, 2021, Shortlisted - Early Music
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
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
- Jesse Rodin, Cut Circle
Awards and reviews
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Gramophone MagazineJuly 2026Critics' Choice 2021
-
Gramophone MagazineJanuary 2021Editor's Choice
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.
