Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs, Volume 1

Description

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 (BHCD 1007) and just one month after releasing the world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s I madrigali a cinque voci (BHCD 1009), Blue Heron announces the release of the first in a new series of recordings dedicated to the music of Johannes Ockeghem and his contemporaries. This is the first of two discs which will present all of Ockeghem’s songs in a complete set. 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.