Last Friday September 9th the Sean Scully Art and Spirituality Institute from Santa Cecilia and the Escolania (children choir) of Montserrat presented the CD Spiritual Contemporary Music, edited by Discos Abadia Montserrat (DAM), which is the result of the first collaboration between these two entities from Montserrat. It was an exciting event, in which about forty people could enjoy the music explained by the musicians involved: Fr. Sergi d'Assis Gelpí, Prefect of the Escolania; Llorenç Castelló, director of the Choir, and Bernat Vivancos, internationally renowned composer, former director of the children's choir of Montserrat between 2007 and 2014.
The album is made up of four pieces of contemporary religious music imbued with significance, that help meditation, and belong to the repertoire of the choir. The first one is Our Father (Vater Unser) by Arvo Pärt, a famous Estonian composer who joins the most modern and minimalist music with religious themes of Byzantine and Roman liturgy; the second work is Eli, Eli, by Hungarian musician György Deák-Bárdos, which is part of its Parasceve Suite; the third one is Pie Jesu by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, from his Mass Requiem composed in 1985 in memory of his father; and finally, the Ave Maria, by Bernat Vivancos, who reenacts the popular Ave Maria by Schubert. The hearing of these four pieces actually reaches the heart.