Josquin des Prez Renaissance masterpiece - the Missa "La, Sol, Fa, Re, Mi" with the La Cetra Vokalensemble under the direction of Carlos Federico Sepúlveda.

In the first concert of the season, La Cetra Vokalensemble takes you to the court of the Viceroy of Valencia, Fernando de Aragón (1488-1550), who maintained an excellent choir at the cathedral there. From the Viceroy's two surviving collections of sheet music, we learn that a Christmas mass by Josquin des Prez called "La, Sol, Fa, Re, Mi", which was popular in Spain, was also performed there.

In the performance of Des Prez's mass, the La Cetra Vokalensemble interpolates Christmas carols from the same collections, some by anonymous authors, others by Spanish composers such as Bartolomé Cárceres and Juan Cepa, both active around the middle of the 16th century. A line from Cárceres' Christmas carol, which we hear at the beginning, gives the entire program its name: when the souls of the righteous, awaiting salvation through the arrival of the Messiah, receive the news of Christ's birth, they sing the mass "La, sol, fa, re, mi" with sheer joy.

The choice of this sequence of notes as an unusual title for Josquin des Prez's famous work, published in 1502, is said to have a humorous background: it is a corruption of the Italian phrase "Lascia fare mi" (Just let me do it) and alludes to an aristocrat who famously kept his petitioners at a distance with this - eternally repeated - promise.

La Cetra Vocal Ensemble
Carlos Federico Sepúlveda - Conductor


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.