O Vos Omnes has found a vein by looking at the need that artists have often had to dedicate works to their teachers in recognition and gratitude for their teaching. The ensemble directed by Xavier Pastrana has pulled that thread and, last night, in the church of Sant Genís in Torroella de Montgrí, took a tour of more than a century of music history by addressing the requiem that the Dutchman Jean Richafort composed in 1532 in memory of his teacher, Josquin Des Prez, the Renaissance composer who, although his biography remains so anonymous, was decisive in the history of music.
Des Prez had in turn written a great work in memory of his own mentor, Johannes Ockeghem, who likewise had created a work in honor of Gilles Binchois, the teacher who had instructed him in composition. This escalation towards the past coincides with this renaissance in which, as the director of the contest, Montse Faura, rightly points out, music was freed from its solely utilitarian value of praising God to become a sensory and intellectual pleasure.
Des Prez was yesterday the protagonist of a concert that claimed the humanist teaching. And as the poet and essayist Ramón Andrés, author of La bóveda y las voces (Acantilado), his latest book about Des Prez, pointed out in the previous conference, it is that abstraction that defines what unites him, the “absence of voice that has occupied contemporary consciousness and that Ligeti or Lutoslawski later went looking for after the Second World War, because they no longer want to have a self-congratulatory discourse and go in search of when music said nothing and said everything”.
O Vos Omnes performed a marvelous program in this sense. A journey that ended with that pure distillation, in the words of Andrés, which is Richafort's Missa pro difunctis, after going through the purity of Binchois and Ockeghem, and various pieces by Des Prez, such as his Stabat Mater.
