Despres: La Déploration de Johannes Ockeghem (Nymphes des bois)

The oeuvre of Johannes Ockeghem influenced, indeed directly inspired a considerable number of musicians who were contemporary with or came immediately after the Master of Tours. Many of these talented composers took one of his works as a model, thus bearing eloquent testimony to their admiration for him.

All of them visited him and helped to popularise the image of him as a benevolent ‘father figure’ to this amazing caste of singers and composers.

Ockeghem’s death at a ripe old age in 1497 greatly affected the brilliant generation that was in the process of making the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and naturally led to the creation of some deeply moving music. Four motets covering a wide stylistic range, a complete polyphonic mass and an extraordinary poem of lamentation make up this touching tribute to Johannes Ockeghem from his colleagues and friends.

The works assembled on this CD represent the highpoint of Franco-Flemish counterpoint and illustrate the imperceptible shift from Middle Ages to Renaissance thanks to this sublime music sublimated by the death of the great master. They are sung here according to the tradition of the great cathedrals and collegiate churches: a cappella, with one or two singers to a part as the works require.

This release presents music associated with the Renaissance master Josquin Des Prez, a composer who towers above all others in the first part of the sixteenth century. Numerous works were attributed to him that have now been proven to be by his contemporaries and successors, including the central work on this recording, Jean Richafort’s expansive and beautiful Requiem. It is performed with affecting clarity by the all-male vocal group Cinquecento, whose many previous discs of Renaissance repertoire for Hyperion have garnered the highest critical praise.

Booklet notes by Stephen Rice, an acknowledged authority on this repertoire, place the music in its historical context and unpick the mysteries of its composition.

The internationally-acclaimed early music specialist and music director Joshua Rifkin leads the highly regarded choral group Cappella Pratensis, in a recording of music from the court of the Medici Pope Leo X. The disc is being made available as a Hybrid SACD.

Founded in 1987, the Dutch based vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis champions the music of Josquin Desprez and the polyphonists of the 15th and 16th centuries. The group combines historically informed performance practice with inventive programmes and original interpretations based on scholarly research and artistic insight. As in Josquin’s time, the members of Cappella Pratensis perform from a central music stand, singing from the original mensural notation scored in a large choir book.

Joshua Rifkin’s work as conductor, pianist, and harpsichordist has spanned music from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. His recordings and concert performances with the Bach Ensemble, which he founded in 1978, set an internationally recognised mark for historically informed and musically vital interpretation of their namesake composer.

Music played a massive part during the time of the Medici pope Leo X, whose tenure covered the years between 1513 and 1521. Much of this has vanished, but a particularly vivid image of Leo’s musical world comes from the so-called Medici Codex, a collection of 53 motets possibly meant at first for Leo’s private use but ultimately presented to his nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino.

To complete a triptych of recordings presenting an alternative view of performance practice from across a century of Franco-Flemish polyphony, Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix now turn their attention to music by Alexander Agricola and his contemporaries in Cecus.

Following on from their two earlier albums, Joye and La Magdalene, Cecus concerns itself with music associated with blind players (notably two fiddlers from Bruges) and memory and commemoration (laments on the deaths of Agricola and Johannes Ockeghem) coming from the chapel of Philippe le Beau and Juana of Castile.

Alexander Agricola’s own musical world – and especially Cecus non judicat de coloribus [The Blind Do Not Distinguish Colours] – crosses the border between theory and practice, between flamboyant experience and rational construction and constantly evokes blindness in relation to memory and written or improvised music, but also in connection with those songs of mourning.

Graindelavoix’s new CD for Glossa promises polyphony in sharply-articulated, richly-coloured performances, provided with athletic vocal gestures by Schmelzer and his Antwerp-based ensemble of musicians from Spain, Estonia, the UK, France and Belgium.

‘An excellent and intriguing anthology….wonderfully sung…containing some of Josquin’s greatest music’ Gramophone

Recording made in 1999.

The earliest mention of Josquin is as a singer in Aix en Provence in 1475. In a short time he would gain a reputation for being the leading composer of the period. He was the first to have his works published, and such was his reputation that many lesser composers passed their music off as being by Josquin some with considerable success.

He was born in 1450 in what today is Belgium, but then was part of the Netherlands. At this period, the Flemish region was a powerhouse for both music and art, and many of its masters travelled widely throughout Europe shaping the artistic agenda for many centuries to follow. Josquin was typical of these much-travelled artistic and cultural envoys. He worked extensively in Italy, at the court in Ferrara, and for the powerful Sforza family in Milan. During his Italian years he met the humanist and writer Angelo Poliziano, and this had a profound effect upon his compositional style. The importance of shaping a composition around the text, giving the words greater impact. Hitherto composers had paid scant attention to the structure of words and syllables, bending and stretching them to suit the melodic line. Josquin combined his mastery of setting words to music with extraordinary displays of contrapuntal genius as can be heard on this CD in the motet Ut Phoebe.

All of his settings are from Biblical or liturgical sources.

This recording brings together music composed in a variety of contrasting yet complemetary forms, from Gregorian chant to more elaborate, polyphonic music, set to words that explore the rawest human emotions, death, sin and repentance. The death of a loved one is a particularly distressing experience, and over the centuries composers have chanelled their grief into their most moving and emotional works. In the 1850s Brahms composed the German Requiem after he lost his mother, and Fauré’s Requiem was also composed after his mother died. Britten produced the imposingly bleak and Mahlerian Sinfonia da Requiem after the death of his parents.

In this recording, the grief of Mary, the mother of Christ, is portrayed in Palestrina’s masterful setting of the Stabat Mater, composed for Pope Gregory XIV. Another moving portrayal of grief is Weelkes’s intimate depiction of the pain of David upon learning of his son Absalom’s death, When David heard. Allegri’s Miserere concerns the belief in a higher power and the submission to it. Set to Psalm 51, the work was recognised by its composer and the Vatican as being of such beauty that its publishing was forbidden. No score was to leave the Papal Chapel. The child Mozart was famously shown the score, and he copied it from memory in the 1770s and in effect released this remarkable work to the wider world.

Vox Neerlandica is an anthology of choral compositions from the Northern and Southern Netherlands for mixed voices a capella, which was published by Harmonia in 1995. The works date from the Renaissance to the present day.