'To play music is not to work': Composer and virtuoso Jordi Savall returns to Sydney

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This was published 6 years ago

'To play music is not to work': Composer and virtuoso Jordi Savall returns to Sydney

By Richard Jinman

The man once described as the "certifiable superstar" of early music is hunched over a water cooler replenishing a paper cup. Jordi Savall never eats before a recital, but hydration and meditation are both essential parts of a warm up routine honed by almost five decades of incessant touring.

"I try to focus the internal energy," says the Spanish musician, conductor and composer after settling in a chair in a room behind the stage at London's august chamber music venue Wigmore Hall. "When I was a young cellist in the 1960s I was very nervous because I had started [performing] quite late. I had to learn to control my insecurity with meditation and relaxation."

Jordi Savall: "As long as we cannot introduce improvisation again to classical music we have no future."

Jordi Savall: "As long as we cannot introduce improvisation again to classical music we have no future."Credit: Richard Perry/The New York Times

He takes a sip of water and brushes a strand of metallic grey hair from his face. Playing music keeps him young, he says, which would sound like a cliche if he wasn't, at the age of 76, so miraculously well-preserved. His rakish beard and moustache suggests an Elizabethan courtier, but his all-black wardrobe is distinctly contemporary. He is courteous, speaks softly and exudes the quiet charisma of a university don.

In two hours time he will join the members of his ensemble Hesperion XXI on the stage to perform what the concert program describes as "music from the Ottoman Empire in dialogue with the Armenian, Greek and Sephardic traditions". It sounds, let's be frank, more like an anthropology lecture than a concert. But Savall and his fellow musicians, a hirsute group of men who wouldn't look out of place backing Nick Cave, soon make it clear they're not here as academics. Wrapping themselves around a battery of exotic instruments ranging from a duduk – an Armenian woodwind instrument with a heartrending sound – to an Iranian hammered dulcimer known as a santur, they create something that sounds, to my untutored ear, like Arabic folk music.

Jordi Savall performs with his wife, Montserrat Figueras, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York in 2006.

Jordi Savall performs with his wife, Montserrat Figueras, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York in 2006.Credit: Hiroyuki Ito/The New York Times

Savall is clearly in charge of proceedings despite his position at the far left of the stage. He lowers his head over his viola da gamba, a bowed instrument resembling a shrunken cello, and his left hand dances on its fingerboard. The viol's strings are made of gut and in the hands of a master it makes a sound that is fragile, plangent and strangely human.

At the centre of the stage the Spanish percussionist Pedro Estevan – the owner of the bushiest beard and hair since Rubeus Hagrid – begins to pummel a large handheld drum as the music gathers momentum. A melody emerges and twists like a serpent. People in the audience are smiling and nodding their heads and for an instant it seems possible that someone is going to get up and dance.

No one does, sadly. But after hearing Hesperion XXI play I can understand what Savall means when he describes the energy created by this ancient music written in the centuries prior to 1730, the year generally acknowledged as the start of the Classical period in Western music associated with titans such as Mozart and Beethoven. "I think music has an extraordinary ability to bring us alive," he says. "And I find the most beautiful music is often from people or societies that have suffered a lot. The Sephardic people [a Jewish community who were persecuted and expelled from Spain in the late 15th century] conserved their songs for 500 years. Why? Because when they were away from Spain they sang these songs and recovered their hope. It gave them a connection with their ancestors. It's the same for an Irish worker working in New York having a hard life. He goes to a pub in the evening and plays his fiddle and the music gives him the energy to keep working hard. There are many people like that."

Hard work has defined Savall's own career. He has recorded a staggering 230 albums since a life changing moment in the summer of 1965 when the 24-year-old cellist decided to devote himself to an instrument – the viol – that first appeared in Spain in the 15th century, but had slipped into obscurity by 1800. Today, he is revered as the man who awoke it from a centuries-old sleep, not with a kiss, but with sheer hard work. He practiced for seven hours a day and scoured Europe's museums and libraries for long-forgotten scores. The result: a small mountain of "beautiful fantastic music" that had been gathering dust. "At this point I thought if all this incredible music remains in museums sleeping it would be terrible. I decided then to dedicate my life to recovering this music and bringing it alive."

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Instead of a tutor – none were available – he let the music, the notes on the page, guide his playing. Determined to perfect his technique he refused to record a note for 10 years until he was certain he had mastered the instrument.

The early audiences at his recitals were tiny he concedes. But those who did come were passionate. In 1974, he and his wife, the Spanish soprano and harpist Montserrat Figueras, felt confident enough to form their own Early Music ensemble, Hesperion XX (the name was updated in 2000). In the years since he has added a choir, La Capella Reial, and a record label, Alia Vox to his empire. The soundtrack he supplied for the popular 1991 movie Tous Les Matins du Monde – a biopic about the French composer and viol player Marin Marais starring Gerard Depardieu – introduced him to an audience more familiar with Queen and Madonna and he won a Best Chamber Music Grammy Award in 2011. Figueras died of cancer the same year, leaving Savall devastated by the loss of a woman he described as "my muse, my lover, the mother of my children, my adviser". He retreated from the spotlight, but returned to touring six months later. Nowadays, his two children Arianna – a soprano and harpist like her mother – and Ferran, a lutist and Baroque guitar player, sometimes share a stage with their father.

Is he slowing down? A little. He carried his own instruments on his back until he was 60 at which point he hired an assistant. Nowadays, the two well-travelled viols always have their own seat on the plane.

His virtuosity is clearly the wellspring of his success, but Savall owes some part of his popularity to his refusal to treat Early Music as a fragile exhibit to be handled with white gloves. Early Music, in common with Folk Music, has its share of purists: those who insist a certain piece of music must be played on a certain instrument in certain way. Savall is not dismissive of such concerns – far from it – but he views the music as a living entity whose survival and propagation is paramount.

"Being a purist is something you need at a certain point in your life when you are in the process of assimilating things and discovering what is correct for, say, France in the 17th century," he says. "But in the end you realise that the music only exists when you play it. It's not like a museum. In a museum you have a painting from the 15th century and it remains like this for eternity, but the music changes each time it is played."

When he records a piece of Early Music Savall will use a historically appropriate instrument. But it is only practical to take two viols on tour so he has to be more relaxed about such niceties when he travels. He also enjoys drawing together music from different periods and regions in an effort to find common threads. His forthcoming Australian tour, for example, promises a blend of Latin music ranging from the late Renaissance to "popular music that survives today".

Not everyone approves of his eclectic approach to repertoire or his enthusiasm for improvisation, something he and his fellow musicians do at every concert. In September he was quoted by the Italian newspaper La Stampa as saying classical music had no future because it had lost the ability to create and improvise. The comment sparked a furious reaction from the Italian cellist Roberto Gini, who accused Savall of personally contributing to the decline by mixing western and eastern music and corrupting them both.

Savall is unrepentant. "I was simply enthusiastic about the way [my] performers were improvising and creating. Every night was something beautiful and different," he says. "So I said as long as we cannot introduce improvisation again to classical music we have no future. This was my idea … we are locked in a routine and the ceremony of the concert. We must remember that until [Franz] Liszt every great composer was also a great performer and they improvised in concerts. Bach improvised. This is the richness of the music."

The article in La Stampa wasn't the first time Savall has courted controversy. In 2014, he made headlines in Spain when he turned down the Spanish government's Euro 30,000 National Music Prize. In a letter posted on his Facebook page he accused politicians in Madrid of ignoring the nation's "essential Hispanic musical heritage" and "belittling" most musicians who have made "great sacrifices to keep the traditions alive".

As a proud Catalan – he was born in Igualada, a city 65km west of Barcelona – his opinion of politicians has not improved much in recent times. His homeland's chaotic push for independence is the result of Madrid's blatant lack of "respect" for Catalonia, its inhabitants and their traditions, he says.

"Spain and Catalonia are like a couple – a man and a woman. They're not happy. The man says 'you have to stay with me'. You cannot have a couple like this. We can be friends or we can be brothers, but we can no longer be a couple. The politicians need to know that the only way to find a solution is dialogue, respect and negotiation."

Savall still records five albums a year and his schedule as both a performer and conductor is packed. Why does he work so hard? "I don't work," he says without hesitation. "To play music is not to work. The work is taking planes and trains and organising concerts. When I sit down to play and hear the first note I relax – I feel I am home."

Jordi Savall's national tour includes the Perth Festival, the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Sydney Opera House (February 25) and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.

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