“Music is the real living history of humanity,” says Jordi Savall. He has been telling this story for five decades through a discography that goes back to the sources of European music. The renowned Catalan conductor returns to the country for three concerts entitled The Golden Age of Consort Music (1500–1750) which open with a musical memory of the film All the mornings of the world.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
The name of Jordi Savall is associated with the promotion of early music. With his ensembles Hespèrion XXI (formerly Hespèrion XX) and Le Concert des Nations, he has revived repertoires covering not only several centuries, but also vast territories, from the gates of the Orient to northern Europe, with a particular attention paid to the musical mixes of the Mediterranean basin.
The Catalan chef has spent his life building bridges between cultures and eras. “Music shows us that even though we come from different cultures, we can come together through it,” he says. What really counts in music, if not the emotion we feel? She speaks to the heart. We don’t need a translation or an explanation, just letting ourselves be touched and dreaming. »
His concerts presented in Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa in the coming days bear witness to this sensitive approach. Jordi Savall, on the viol overcoat, will conduct a consort of six musicians (viols, theorbo, guitar and violone) who will perform fantasies, battles and dances from the Renaissance and the Baroque period drawn from both Italy and Germany or in England.
These pieces, chosen among others from John Dowland, Joan Cabanilles, Henry Purcell and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, show, according to the conductor, the influence of Venice on the development of the musical language of a time when instrumental pieces were gaining in popularity in the face of the vocal music. “Consort music is full of song relationships because sometimes it comes from the canzone “, he explains.
Jordi Savall built his program in such a way as to show that in this Europe where several different cultures and styles rubbed shoulders, there was a community of spirit, a common language. “That’s what I find beautiful,” he says. The conductor adds that these pieces also show “a moment in European culture when the most refined knowledge was not shared in large spectacular works, but in intimate music, which we played at home, among friends”.
Join the Composer
Whether he explores the Sephardic repertoire, seeks the eastern sources of Mediterranean music, revisits Lully or Beethoven, the Catalan conductor aims for one thing only: to get closer to the composer’s intentions and emotions. This is also the miracle of music, according to him: to manage to “unite our spirit” with that of a composer.
When you listen to a song by Monteverdi, you feel the same emotion as the people who were there in his time. You are time traveling.
Jordi Savall
His desire to go as close as possible to the intention of the composer, he has in particular put it at the service of the recording of the complete symphonies of Beethoven in recent years. A great work that he achieved by going back to the manuscripts, studying every detail and respecting every tempo. By also giving yourself time: two six-day blocks of rehearsals for six hours a day, per program.
Jordi Savall also insisted on recording them with an ensemble similar in size to that which Beethoven had planned: no more than 50 or 55 musicians for the first eight. “An orchestra of 120 musicians for Beethoven or Haydn is not necessary, he judges. It’s effective, but it loses the nuances, the poetic side. »
The last lesson
His concert The Golden Age of Music for Consort opens with fantasies on the theme A young girla sung version of which appears on the soundtrack of All the mornings of the world by Alain Corneau (1991), a film which introduced the viola da gamba and Jordi Savall to a wide audience.
However, it is not the influence of his work that he thinks of when asked about the impact of this collaboration on his career. Rather, he thinks of what Alain Corneau, whom he calls his “last viola da gamba teacher”, brought him. The director, present at the time of the recording, in fact encouraged him to transpose the emotions of Marin Marais when he interpreted The dreamerhis goodbye to the woman he had loved.
The lesson changed his way of playing. “I’ve been trying since then to put myself in the composer’s shoes. I wonder what he went through, what his music was for. It allows me to live each piece of music and that’s what I do with an orchestra or now with the consort. »
Sunday at the Palais Montcalm (Québec), Monday at the Maison symphonique (Montréal) and Tuesday at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Center (Ottawa)