The aim of Paraísos Perdidos (Lost Paradises) is to give the literature, history and music of ancient Hesperia and the New World the recognition that they deserve. Keenly aware of the gulf of more than five hundred years which separates us from those remote times, we believe that the beauty and vitality of the music they have bequeathed to us have the power to move today’s audiences, in the same way that the poetic quality and expressive power of the texts recited in the programme movingly bring the dramatic events they evoke back into focus. We are also mindful of the fact that, despite the timeless artistic dimension of these various musical traditions, the instruments, individual forms and sounds associated with them - indeed, everything that goes to make up their characteristic styles, inevitably bears the imprint of the age in which they were created. We have therefore opted for appropriate historical accuracy in vocal and instrumental performance, enhanced by the corresponding creative imagination for which the vocalists and instrumentalists of the ensembles Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, as well as the soloists specialising in Oriental musical traditions and in the ancient instruments (Amerindian flutes) of the New World, are justly famous.

Jordi Savall, 2006