Di versate minestre

This setting of an Italian text by Jacquet de Berchem opens with a lively interplay of voices that immediately captures the lighthearted, somewhat satirical mood of the words. The composer uses the SATB choir to depict the scene described in the Canto XXXIV of Dante's Inferno, where a vast crowd of the careless are gathered, those who left their alms until after their death. The music vividly paints the image of a large mass of soup, a metaphor for the messy and perhaps pointless accumulation of good deeds left too late. The composer contrasts this with the memory of a once-fragrant mountain of varied flowers, now putrid, symbolising the wasted potential of delayed generosity.