- Joel Frederiksen, Emma-Lisa Roux, Hille Perl, Domen Marincic: “A Day with Suzanne: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen” (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)
- Stile Antico: “The Golden Renaissance: William Byrd” (Decca)
- The King’s Singers, Fretwork: “Tom and Will” (Signum Classics)
For all of the secrecy, holiness, and exquisite pain of the medieval troubadour songs, the stories they profess to tell are one-sided. Rarely are we offered the woman’s perspective, or even any supporting evidence for the emotional evisceration that’s often at the heart of these ballads of forbidden and unconsummated love. Not so for contemporary troubadours. Take Leonard Cohen, whose early ballads like “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne” are based on his real-life paramours Suzanne Verdal and Marianne Ihlen. They could easily be rendered into Old Occitan, transcribed from guitar to lute, and sound like lost tales of courtly love; worlds in which lovers hold onto each other like crucifixes and feed each other tea and oranges that come all the way from China, until they—inevitably—come apart. As the narrator of these relationships, Cohen sounds like a postmodernist Tristan, enchanted, seduced, and ultimately alone.