Cants espirituals a dues veus

Although Volume 1 contained popular traditional songs, in this second volume of the collection we have brought together six spiritual songs. Four of them are religious ones (two by John Rutter; La Verge al pessebre – The Virgin Mary by the Manger by César Franck; and a chorale by J.S. Bach) and two deal with other specific themes. Pots sentir-me? (Can you hear me?) by Bob Chilcott is about a poetic vision of the world presented through the eyes of a deaf child, and Retorn a la llar (Come back home) with music by Antonín Dvořák tells us of an idyllic return home after a period of intense nostalgia.
The music flows with natural elegance and delicate sensitivity in the compositions of the English musician John Rutter. In Pots sentir-me? Bob Chilcott takes us on a trip to a magical world of deep feelings through more jazzlike harmonies. We then enter the romantic and personal world of César Franck with the suspenseful sensations created by the chromatic chords of La Verge al pessebre. The talent of Johann Sebastian Bach always shines through in all his work and here we have adapted and reduced one of his chorales to a piece for just two voices.
Finally, the last piece in the volume involves the initial fragment of the New World Symphony by Dvořák, in a vocal version in which the American musician William Arms Fisher, a disciple of Dvořák, prepared a text to express the pleasure of meeting loved ones once more.
The texts have been adapted into Catalan with the aim of both making their meaning clearer when singing and also to aid the smooth flow of the musical reading.
We hope you enjoy these works.

Agustí Delgado