This double album is a portrait of Jordi Savall, in which some of the finest Alia Vox recordings alternate with pieces inspired by these very recordings, written by contemporary composers and performed on piano by Diego Fernández Magdaleno.

Over the last 15 years, Jordi Savall has been exploring the links between Western and Eastern repertoires because he regards this work as a way to develop a better mutual understanding. On Oriente Lux, Hespèrion XXI plays alongside the ensemble Orpheus 21, created by him in the wake of the recent migrant crisis to welcome musicians from countries stricken by war, hunger or disasters to draw attention to the dignity shared of all humankind. The idea - prevailing during the Middle Ages - of a light coming from the East, Oriente Lux, is actualized on this recording with the fruitful encounter of repertoires from Syria, Bangladesh, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Greece, Lebanon, Irak, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey.

The twenty pieces comprising the musical collection in the Codex Trujillo del Perú are an exceptional case in the history of the indigenous music of the New World. This collection of tonadas, cachuas, tonadillas, bayles, cachuytas and lanchas offers a glimpse of the repertory native to the traditions of the country, as indicated by the text of one of the cachuas sung “al uso de nuestra tierra” (“according to the customs of our land”) and in particular the songs and dances favoured by the popular classes who lived in the “Viceroyalty of Peru” at the end of the 18th century.

In the monastic life of the Cistercian order, as in the case of the female monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (Burgos), a royal pantheon, the seat of coronations and the epicentre of a very intense musical life in which singing played an extremely important part, the nuns were called upon to live a life of simplicity, silence, prayer and contemplation. Flavit auster, which is part of the Las Huelgas Codex, is a Marian text inspired in the Song of Songs in which the most powerful symbols of femininity appear, such as the honeycomb, milk and honey, and protectiveness described as “mother of mercy, port of hope for the shipwrecked and virgin mother purified.”

Tomás Luis de Victoria’s OFFICIUM HEBDOMADÆ SANCTÆ is one of the most compelling examples of creative genius in a composer, a toweringly poignant and masterpiece on the Passion of Christ, a pure but infinitely subtle creation, Ad majorem Dei gloriam.