Gramophone Magazine
January 2021
Editor's Choice

Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin

Despres: Nymphes des bois / Requiem a 5
Ockeghem: Ma Maistresse
Ockeghem: Presque transi
Ockeghem: L'autre d'antan
Ockeghem: Ma bouche rit
Ockeghem: ¿Qu'es mi vida, preguntays? a 4
Ockeghem: Baisies moy
Ockeghem: D'ung aultre amer
Ockeghem: Quant de vous seul
Ockeghem: Je n'ay dueil a 3
Ockeghem: Les desleaulx
Ockeghem: Tant fuz gentement resjouy
Ockeghem: S'elle m'amera / Petite camusette a 4
Ockeghem: Je n'ay dueil a 4
Ockeghem: Aultre Venus
Ockeghem: Fors seulement l'attente
Ockeghem: Fors seullement contre / Fors seulement l'attente
Ockeghem: O rosa bella a 2
Ockeghem: La despourveue
Ockeghem: Se vostre cuer
Ockeghem: Prenez sur moy
Ockeghem: Ung aultre l'a
Ockeghem: Il ne m'en chault
Ockeghem: Mort, tu as navré / Miserere a 4

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.

"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." - Gramophone Magazine, January 2021.