Not Just Plain Folk
Jordi Savall plays music for our time
In the 1990s, I wrote with some frequency for the magazine that was given away free by Tower Records in all their locations, Pulse! and also for its specialty spinoff, Classical Pulse! (which I ended up editing for a few years). My beat was “New Music,” partly because 20th-century classical CDs were so expensive at the time, the only way I could explore the history of experimental music was to become a reviewer and get on classical label promo lists. Those lists led to an unexpected discovery for me, that contemporary performances and recordings of much older written music - “early music” - were in fact a hotbed of improvisation. Boston is a center for early music, hosting a biennial festival and exhibition that draws stars of the genre from all over the world, and I started haunting the concerts it sponsors. My favorite performers were the Catalan couple, Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras, and I asked to interview them during one of their visits to Boston, which led to this feature. Naomi and I also got to share a memorable late-night meal with them at a sushi bar in Boston Chinatown, one of the few places open in town then for hanging out after a show. It was not unlike an evening with our rock and roll friends. They had met and married in the late 1960s, and formed their band Hespèrion XX as a four-piece in 1974.
The luminous Montserrat Figueras died in 2011, after a long illness. Jordi Savall continues to record and tour with the since-renamed Hespérion XXI; he returns to Boston for a performance this April.
Originally published by Tower Records’ Classical Pulse! (October/November 1997). The paragraph in brackets, about drone techniques Hespèrion employ and the difficulty that introduces to group performance, was cut by the magazine before publication. I found it in my original draft.
In a proper Episcopal church in the Back Bay, Boston’s professional class is gathered for an evening of medieval and Renaissance music. On the altar are four men with sets of delicate, ancient instruments: fiddles, harps, recorders, and drums. In the pulpit, delivering what must be the most powerful sermon heard in New England since Puritan times, is the magnificent singer Montserrat Figueras. Figueras holds a folio of music before her, but is transported, eyes closed, voice soaring. The musicians play with furrowed brows, eyes fixed on their music stands. But turn those stands around, and find… a few cryptic marks on otherwise blank pieces of paper.
“What we played tonight was 90 percent improvisation,” explains Jordi Savall after the concert. He is a virtuoso player of the viola da gamba and medieval viols, and the leader of Hespèrion XX, arguably the premier early music chamber group in the world. “We have the melody and the lyric text,” — typically, little else can be found in the ancient sources they utilize — “but everything else happens in the performance. We rehearse basic structures, but the dialogues are all unique to the moment of the concert. Of course, we have a memory,” he adds, perhaps a little ruefully, “and so we keep our nice ideas. But not all! Sometimes we are more inspired, sometimes less.”