CDs, DVDs & Games

Item Description

Includes the following albums from Blue Heron:

Cipriano de Rore (1515/16-1565): I madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1542)
[2-CD set]
The first release of new material from Blue Heron since winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music, this two-disc set is the world-premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s landmark first book of madrigals for five voices. The set includes all twenty madrigals in De Rore’s 1542 print, as well as readings of the Italian poems (many of which are by Petrarch) by Alessandro Quarta. De Rore is celebrated as an innovator who helped create the madrigal as it is known today, putting the music at the service of the text and inventing a new, dramatic, and expressive harmonic language. In this music, listeners will perceive a deep engagement with the text, an engagement matched by the singers of Blue Heron, who were led by both Scott Metcalfe and Alessandro Quarta in developing an appropriately rhetorical style of performance. Musicologist Jessie Ann Owens (Professor emeritus, University of California, Davis) has shown that the book is a poetic and musical cycle that likely resulted from a collaboration between De Rore and the Venetian poet Giovanni Brevio (c. 1480-1560), who wrote the opening and closing poems of the set. The narrative structure is illustrated with “the colors of the modal system,” the madrigals being sequenced in modal order. Professor Owens’ research and conclusions are presented in extensive notes in the booklet. 

Johannes Ockeghem (c.1420-1497): Complete Songs, Volume 1
This is the first disc of a 2-CD set that will include all of Ockeghem’s songs; 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, Volume 1 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, translations, and notes on the music and performance practice by Sean Gallagher (musicological adviser for Ockeghem@600, Blue Heron’s project to perform the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem in a series of thirteen concert programs) and Blue Heron’s artistic director Scott Metcalfe.


More info: www.blueheron.org/recordings/cds/

Item Special Note

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