Johannes OCKEGHEM. Complete Songs, volume 1  —  Blue Heron

[12.11.2019]


medieval.org | amazon.com

Blue Heron  1010

One year after winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music for the fifth album in its series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, and just one month after releasing the world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rores I madrigali a cinque voci, 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 releases which will present all of Ockeghems 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 centuryrondeau, virelai, and balladeto exquisitely crafted polyphony in which all voices are granted equally beautiful and compelling melodies.
Besides eleven of Ockeghems 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 Ockeghems Quant de vous seul, and Au travail suis by the composer Barbingant, which quotes both text and music from the opening of Ockeghems Ma maistresse.
The booklet contains complete texts and translations and notes on the music and performance practice by Sean Gallagher and Blue Herons music director Scott Metcalfe.

— amazon.com



The chansons of Johannes Ockeghem, written in the second half of the 15th century, sound so fresh and new in this marvellous release from Scott Metcalfe and Blue Heron that the intervening centuries feel like some sort of illusion.
Belying the music's "nowness", the detailed liner notes by Ockeghem scholar Sean Gallagher demonstrates the problems common to most 500+ year old music, with complexities of attribution and dating. Indeed, we're lucky that some of this music has survived at all; seven of the songs exist in only one manuscript.
And Scott Metcalfe shows how difficult and problematic it is to bridge the gap between the remaining manuscripts and viable performances today. He presents evidence about the pronunciation of 15th century French, about whether certain musical parts should be vocal or instrumental, and about who should sing the high parts, a woman, a girl, a boy, or an adult man singing falsetto.
Metcalfe is open about the remaining questions - "We remain unsure about all the possibilities open to singers of such parts" - but the results sound to me so outstandingly beautiful that surely he's made the correct decisions in the majority of cases. I know that I'll continue to look to Blue Heron for the most impressive music of the period.

This recording is part of Blue Heron's project Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project to perform the complete works of this great composer. It will be complete in 2021, around the time of the 600th anniversary of Ockeghem's birth.

— Dean Frey, amazon.com




[12.11.2019]

[1.12.2019]

medieval.org Remarks

http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/remarks.html
19 November 2019
Todd M. McComb

———


Evidently I couldn't help but foreshadow Blue Heron's new Ockeghem: Complete Songs Volume 1 in the previous entry, and I'm indeed excited: It's about time not only that someone revisited more of these classic outputs in a systematic way, but also that works beyond mass cycles come back into vogue for larger recording projects.

In particular, Blue Heron is rather self-consciously issuing a followup to the classic set by Medieval Ensemble of London from the early 1980s: It's surely that ensemble's most impressive release — not as lengthy as their complete Dufay, but rather more accomplished, both in terms of selecting the program & performing the songs. In fact, Scott Metcalfe & Blue Heron follow many of the same stylistic choices, and the aura of that older interpretation continues to shine through on this new set, in spite or (perhaps) because of its ongoing refinement of materials & technique.

The set itself emerges from Blue Heron's "Ockeghem @ 600" project, which includes a variety of concerts, including of the masses, but has announced only this double recording issue — with Volume 2 (whose cover already appears in the booklet of Volume 1) announced for 2022, at the close of the Ockeghem project. I guess that means we'll have to wait, and I don't know if other recordings are actually planned, but the first is tantalizing: Although I'd associated Blue Heron with larger choral works, and there are indeed many people involved in this production, each song is handled intimately, with individual singers selected accordingly. (In fact, the only doubling on the disc occurs, to good effect, in the lowest part of Petite camusette.) The sound of the bray harp, the main accompanying instrument here, is also handled carefully (as analogized to e.g. bray lute mentioned here recently), and indeed care seems to be the watch word: The music & interpretations are full of restraint, such that if anything, one could criticize the performance for lacking ecstasy.

I'm not complaining, though, as the attention to detail is remarkable, all the way from the rhythms of the smallest phrases to large scale forms & ensemble timbres & colors.... The style isn't innovative — rather it involves taking the time to pursue every question around a complete set & its precise articulation. (A new musical edition of the songs is also in preparation....) It's thus at a different level of accomplishment than many of the items featured here, i.e. that are bringing repertory back into sound in a more provisional way, and was added to my personal list, displacing the classic set in anticipation of the second volume. That it doesn't seem "very new" tempers my excitement a bit, but this is a very accomplished & thorough presentation of some of the best music of the mid-15th century. And being able to admire recorded interpretations that don't seem particularly innovative seems like a welcome marker of maturity for this repertory (& it's been hard won).



[1.12.2019]