Classical - Dermot Clinch hears the seductive early music of the Catalan Jordi Savall
The highlight of the South Bank Centre's early music weekend in London next week will be a programme of Moorish-Andalusian, Jewish and Christian song from medieval Spain directed by a man who wears a fine beard and is named after the patron saint of his native Catalonia. St Jordi's instrument of choice was a spear for dragons. Jordi Savall's instruments will include, alongside more conventional instruments of the European renaissance, the Arabic oud, rebab and sarod, as well as the exquisitely passionate voice of his wife, the singer Montserrat Figueras.
What is distinctive about Savall? He is one of the most influential practitioners of authentic early music performance. He is the outstanding viola da gamba virtuoso of his generation whose soundtrack for the film Tous les Matins du Monde has sold 700,000 copies. His 1976 EMI recording of songs from Christian and Jewish Spain, re-released on Virgin Classics, is a festival of exotic and unusual sound and colour yet hardly worth buying, since an understanding of the language of the renaissance Sephardim is a prerequisite and printed texts and translations are not provided.
Like anyone in the conservation and reconstruction business, Savall has a high regard for the concrete, graspable facts of history. He loves manuscripts, old instruments, gut strings, but has never got hung up on any of them. Authentic performance becomes a school of facts, facts and nothing else at its most abused; in the school of Savall and his followers, facts are allowed precedence but not licence. If Gramophone magazine takes issue with his renaissance castanets - Savall's "sound world may have more to do with late-20th-century preconceptions than historical fact" - the performer's riposte will likely be that if critics believe they are in possession of the truth, it is because they forget there is no absolute truth.
How did the Portuguese dance La Folia sound in 15th-century Lisbon? Who can know? Those little Iberian bells called cascabeles tinkle nicely: Savall's exploration of the Folia on its journey from renaissance Portugal to baroque France will kick its first track off with them. A medieval drum would give the same piece a lift. Thirty seconds in, here comes the tambour, like a tabla spluttering on the scene in an Indian improvisation. Individually characterful voices - triple harp, viola da gamba, guitar - combine, as ever in Savall's carefully imagined sound worlds, in glorious Technicolor celebration.
Savall has been criticised for putting too much "personality" in his music. In Britain especially, where choir-school gentility remains the model for early music practice, instrumental as well as vocal, the criticism sticks. In France, Spain and Italy, the rich, characterful, dancing, exhaustively researched Savall approach has been heeded. What is musical performance? Is it painful reconstruction? Or an act of living, personality-imprinted creation?
Savall's answer resembles, not coincidentally perhaps, the dictum of an Indian guru. Spontaneity is the essence: "Spontaneity on a basis of knowledge, for one can only improvise when one has spent years studying and acquiring the science." Last year, after splitting from the French company with whom he had produced more than 70 recordings over 25 years, Savall formed a recording company of his own, Alia Vox, and the first six albums for the new label demonstrate this performer's scientific accomplishment. They range from the para-liturgical "Song of the Sibyl" as it may have been performed in Palma de Mallorca in the 15th century to performances, uniquely beautiful and sensual, of Elizabethan viol music as represented in a single manuscript in the British Library, played by his group Hesperion XX.
The most uplifting, seductive music of the series so far is contained in the album Les Voix Humaines, on which Savall plays, alone, the bass viol with which he first made his name. The CD records the crucial conflict in European music of the baroque period between melody and harmony, and which should predominate. The D minor Prelude of Karl Friedrich Abel shimmers in a harmonic haze of arpeggios and chords, a mirage of musical solidity; other pieces by other composers sing with a directness that imitates the human voice of the album's title. No conclusion is reached; the music of 300 years later has not settled the question. Savall does not answer, he asks.
Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX appear at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 5 September. Telephone 0171-960 4242
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