In December I suggested that if they wanted to explain this country to someone who wanted to understand it, they should invite them to hear Roger Mas with the Cobla Sant Jordi at the Palau de la Música in February. The concert was held yesterday, with a full house right up to the last row of the amphitheatre, and ended with a great party, with both the spectators and the artists enjoying it. But this article is not intended to criticise the performance, among other reasons because the excellent aftertaste that Mas and the copla left us with a couple of months ago in Porrera is still just as valid, but rather it wants to return to the idea of understanding a country through the work of an artist.
Feel the copla instruments dominate with incontestable confidence a repertoire in which there is popular song,song book,chanson,Jazz and details of a film soundtrack are both reality and metaphor. Reality, because it turns out that contemporary universal music sounds like a Catalan music, and metaphor because it shows that we have our own tools to interpret the world with our characteristic sound, that is, with the bias of our personality, as long as these tools are used by talented, skilled and passionate hands. The result is that any listener in the world can vibrate and be moved by the work without the need for translations and discovering the original sound of a culture. If we believe it, the tools do not fail. And the more we believe it, the more catchy is the perception that Francesc Pujols – to whom Mas has been paying homage for years – exaggerated, yes, but only a little, about our capacity to admire the world.
