De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490

Released: November, 2012 (double album)

Features sacred music by Renaissance composers living and working in Rome
Offers new interpretations of music by Josquin des Prez, including his famous Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales
Presents premiere recordings of works by Marbrianus de Orto, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and other scandalously understudied late fifteenth-century singer-composers employed in the newly built chapel of Pope Sixtus IV. In a space that overlooked frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino, they gathered around enormous choirbooks to sing one another’s masses, motets, and hymns. Cut Circle’s recording aims to capture the soundscape of the Sistine Chapel as Josquin knew it.