To build and rebuild bridges between the past and the future, through a gift ever new but with resonances and values of something known and familiar.

I never have any fear for Xavier Montsalvatge. He, as that Sioux chief said to President Roosevelt at the White House, with a little bit of too much has enough. This little bit of too much for Xavier Montsalvatge is the world of his music, where he lives and where we all live when he invites us in…

Recently he says that he feels old. I don't believe it. He has been saying that since he was thirty. He is not old. Music, like gold, is always twenty.

One of the greatest virtues of the works of Montsalvatge is that they appear only like themselves. They are the product of a thorough musician but also of an intellectual concerned with the ideas of his time who, in addition, practices journalism and edited the magazine Destino in a period that was not at all easy and who knew how to be a universal creator from his deep Catalan roots. Montsalvatge always knows that to belong to a place one needs first to belong to the world and that he is profoundly Catalan because he is universal. Thus his work occupies a preeminent place in Catalan music history because it belongs no less in that of Spain, Europe, and the world.

It seems to me very appropriate to reward a person who has done a good job. Montsalvatge is one of the great musicians of our century. He is a composer who has reached beyond our borders. He is also a person who is eighty years old. He is living history of a part of our music. He has gone through various stages, such as the Caribbean, that of the Canciones negras, or the influence of jazz. He has also gone into the experimental area and made some ventures with twelve-tone techniques. But, in his evolution, he has retained the virtue of being always himself. Montsalvatge is a Mediterranean composer. His music is at once identifiable: it is filled with light.