Cut Circle’s Josquin, Dramatic and Revelatory
When it comes to music of the Renaissance, Josquin des Prez is about as close to a household name as might be possible. Certainly, his works do not want for attention in modern…
Reviews
Critical responses to Cut Circle’s concerts and recordings.
EDITOR’S CHOICE (JOSQUIN: I. Motets & Chansons)
This is gloriously invigorating early music singing from Cut Circle, a survey of music by Josquin presented with precision, personality, individuality and yet also an attractive sense…
Cut Circle Scores Anew in Anonymous Masses
Last March, I had the pleasure of reviewing the then-latest release from acclaimed American ensemble Cut Circle — a fantastic double-disc tour through the songs of Johannes Ockeghem…
Superb Reconstruction of Two Anonymous Renaissance Masses
At first glance, one might think that Musique en Wallonie’s new album, devoted to premiere performances of two anonymous masses composed in the last third of the fifteenth century, is…
Ockeghem Chansons Bring Out Cut Circle’s Best
Since their debut almost 20 years ago, the eight-voice ensemble Cut Circle has not lacked for critical acclaim, given rightly for both their quality of performance (Diapason d’Or) and…
A Fresh Look at Ockeghem’s Songs
The ensemble Cut Circle, directed by Jesse Rodin, comes to grips with the songs of the Franco-Flemish composer. Ockeghem occupies a special place among Franco-Flemish composers of the…
CD of the Month (Johannes Ockeghem : Les chansons)
It is astonishing and fascinating that two vocal ensembles have simultaneously recorded Johannes Ockeghem’s manageable songs and published them on CD, especially since we know this…
EDITOR’S CHOICE (Johannes Ockeghem : Les Chansons)
This is pathbreaking. Certainly Cut Circle are not the first to sing late 15th-century songs without instrumental participation. The Orlando Consort did it for two discs of Loyset…
Ockeghem
… It is important to read Rodin’s notes first, for he makes it clear that these are not the bland performances that are so often heard in early music. It’s good to be prepared for the…
Ockeghem Chansons
This double CD is destined to revolutionize the interpretation of Ockeghem’s songs (24 in all), skillfully cast in the form of virelais and rondeaux, leaving the performers free to…
Songs Full of Pathos
SONGS FULL OF PATHOS Cut Circle Engages Brilliantly with the Chansons of Johannes Ockeghem A singular figure in musical culture during the second half of the fifteenth century,…
New Releases
Cut Circle is an excellent American group specializing in repertoire from the turn of the middle ages and the Renaissance, and led by Professor Jesse Rodin at Stanford University.…
Johannes Ockeghem: Les Chansons
The chansons of Johannes Ockeghem are gems. In an attempt to bring this music to life, Cut Circle made the decision to bring the microphones up close, as if to intensify the…
Cut Circle Sings Ockeghem
It begins with a bloodcurdling outcry—this new complete recording of Johannes Ockeghem’s chansons. The ensemble Cut Circle arouses great emotions—and zooms us very close to a strange…
Ockeghem Chansons
Simply the most perfect recording I have been waiting for for decades! Perfectly intelligible rendering to the texts where you can not only realize the beauty of the poetry but also…
New CDs
“L’autre d’antan” – “Someone from yesteryear passed by the other day / And in passing pierced me / With a glance forged in Milan.” It’s obviously not a good idea to eat cherries with…
Diapason d’Or for Guillaume Du Fay : Les messes à teneur
Recorded at the Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (USA) by Seth Torres in January and August 2014. Arranged in a curved formation, the eight voices are close and…
Cut Circle and Love in the 15th Century
Cut Circle is the name of an eight-voice vocal ensemble, led by Jesse Rodin, that specializes in the music of the 15th-century master composers of the Franco-Flemish School: Guillaume…
DUFAY, Les Messes à Teneur
This is a red-letter day: at last we have uniform and sensible recordings of the four great cantus firmus Masses that are more or less all we have from the last 20 or so years of…
Review of Du Fay
We now have nine Masses on records that are attributed to Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474), not counting the anonymous Missa Caput (Fanfare 20:4, now on Helios) which was published as his…
Review of Du Fay
This two-disc set is such a good idea and I can’t imagine why no-one had thought of it before. These masses are late works in the sense that they seem to date from after 1450 and all…
Shoulder to Shoulder in Front of the Choirook
REGENSBURG: It is an image that attendees of the night concert on Pentecost Sunday in the Dominican Church will remember: the vocalists from Cut Circle (USA) standing shoulder to…
Four Tenor Masses
Born around the year 1400 and trained as a choirboy at the Cathedral of Cambrai, the famed Dufay initially composed isorhythmic motets – in the austere sonority and hierarchically…
The Four Tenor Masses
All the tenor masses of Guillaume Dufay—the masses in which a “foreign melody” is the pre-existent axis of the composition—in a two-CD set: this is a great idea, especially for the…
Review of De Orto et Josquin
To better understand the master Josquin des Prez (c 1450/1455-1521) and his unique style, the Renaissance vocal ensemble Cut Circle, under the direction of Stanford professor Jesse…
Review of De Orto et Josquin
This handsomely bound CD release (also available as a digital download, but here the CD version is the choice) is in turn a companion to a larger opus, a musicological work about the…
Music en Wallonie [review of “De Orto and Josquin”]
Despite the collapse of the record industry and the marginalization of scholarly music, the small label “Music en Wallonie” holds strong! A “niche” label, focused not on the…
The Wallonian Renaissance
It is known that Josquin Desprez was a singer in the Sistine Chapel from 1489 to 1494. It was Sixtus IV who erected it in 1475, a huge Chapel with the presumed dimensions of Solomon’s…
Drifting Along with Renaissance Octet Cut Circle
Listening to the superfine, Renaissance vocal octet known as Cut Circle the other night, my mind drifted, happy, lazy and somehow alert, all at once. What sounds! A famous musical…