Jordi Savall has never been constrained by category. Though he is inarguably the world’s finest viola da gamba player, the 69-year-old Savall is also a conductor, scholar, early-music champion, and professional thought-provoker. Savall and his colleagues–foremost among them his wife, the 62-year-old soprano and fellow Catalonia native Montserrat Figueras--have long been at the forefront of scholarly engagement and imaginative programming. Named by UNESCO in 2008 as ¨Artists for Peace,¨ two grand-scaled efforts–Jerusalem and Le Royaume Oublie (The Forgotten Kingdom), each released on their own Alia Vox label–are landmark achievements not just taken on musical terms, but in furthering a larger cultural conversation.
¨Sumptuous¨ doesn’t begin to describe the loving and thoughtful effort that goes into these projects’ packaging. Both Jerusalem and Le Royaume Oublie are hardbound books as well as multi-disc SACD sets–and they would make for a very handsome coffee table presentation. Jerusalem, which contains two audio discs, also encompasses 400 pages of essays and texts in English, Castilian Spanish, French, German, Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Arabic; Le Royaume Oublie, with three CDs, packs in more than 550 pages with notes in French, English, Occitan, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and German. Gorgeous images taken from artwork and manuscripts and performance photos of the musicians complete the intellectual and aesthetic feasts.
Le Royaume Oublie (The Forgotten Kingdom) takes as its focus the realm of Occitania (also sometimes called ¨the Oc country¨). While it has never been recognized as an independent entity politcally or legally, this region--which encompasses much of southern France as well as parts of Italy, Spain, and Monaco--was in the Middle Ages was a crossroads for cultural influences that ranged from the Moorish Al-Andalus to France, Italy, the Balkans, and Byzantium.
Occitan religious beliefs and practices were rooted in Catharism, a dualistic system that challenged the accepted principles of orthodox Roman Catholicism; indeed, the Catholic hierarchy rejected Cathar beliefs as heresy. The theological divide came to a boil in 1208 when Pope Innocent III launched an anti-Cathar crusade; among other blows, 20,000 residents of the town of Beziers were slaughtered the following year by the Crusaders as punishment for not handing over two hundred Cathar ¨heretics.¨
The winner of the 2010 Midem Classical Awards Prize for best early music album, Jerusalem, a project first conceived as a concert series at Paris’ Cite de la Musique and then fully fleshed out on a visit to the city that three religions hold holy. For Jerusalem, Savall and Figueras–whose usual forces in their groups Hesperion XXI (formerly known as Hesperion XX) and La Capella Reial de Catalunya include artists from Spain, France, England, Greece, and Belgium–invited musicians from Iraq, Armenia, Turkey, Morocco, Afghanistan and Syria as well as artists of Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds to join in. As Savall writes in his introduction to Jerusalem, this so greatly loved and fiercely contested city ¨afforded us the opportunity to create a powerful and beautiful evocation of both the grandeur and the folly that makeup the history of a city, with all the complex problems of a place which, even today, continues to mark the limits and weaknesses of civilization.¨
The Jerusalem set moves through the music of the three great monotheistic traditions. Jewish music from Israel and further afield–from songs of 15th-century exile to a modern Ashkenazic song lamenting the Holocaust–rest (and not always ideologically comfortably) next to such selections as a 9th-century Greek hymn to the Virgin Mary and a Turkish march to represent the 1517 conquest of the city by the Ottomans. The program is structured so beautifully, however, that the performances flow beautifully and satisfyingly–it’s less a pastiche than an actual narrative.
Even putting aside the socio-cultural-political import of such efforts, you’re still left with truly superb music-making. Jordi Savall has been at the forefront of the early music movement for decades now, but even the most casual classical music listener would be enraptured by his work in the soundtrack to the film Tous les matins du monde: the Couplets de folies of Marin Marais, for example, or the Gavotte du tendre attributed to Saint-Colombe, are extraordinarily touching works by any era’s measure.
Montserrat Figueras has a pure sound that has sounds miraculously untouched by the passage of time—a marvel, considering that they founded their ensemble, Hesperion XX in 1974. (Their daughter Arianna Savall—who visually is a carbon copy of her mother—has inherited the musicianship of both her parents; she has developed into a very fine harpist and sings as well. Savall and Figueras’ son Ferran Savall has started joining his parents in concert as a lauded vocalist–clearly, this family business is operating brilliantly.)
Their colleagues are no less stellar. On Jerusalem, for example, the delicacy, precision, and filigree of such soloists as singer Lior Elmalich, oud player Yair Dalal, ney flute artist U. Abu Ali, and santour (hammered dulcimer) player Dimitris Psonis, and the sense of ensemble playing they create together on the late 11th- or early 12th-century song ¨Beautiful City, Delight of the World¨ with a text by the medieval Jewish poet, physician and philosopher Yehuda Ha-Levy is astonishing.
With these editions, Savall and his colleagues have leapt easily past binding notions of genre. (Would that religious and cultural divides be so deftly healed!) Listeners and musicians interested in such intercultural initiatives as Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra would do well to invest in Savall’s recordings and live performances; the illumination that such re-examination of centuries well past can have a tremendous impact on the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.
If you are in New York in early May, be sure to catch these amazing musicians’ visit to Lincoln Center’s ¨Great Performers¨ series, in which their live performances will be augmented by a discussion by noted author and scholar Karen Armstrong; a panel discussion that includes Savall, Armstrong, and composer Osvaldo Golijov; and a screening of the documentary ¨Knowledge is the Beginning,¨ which documents the birth of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
