The Renaissance Musician

In recent years musicologists have raised questions about the possibility of achieving “authenticity” in the performance of early music. Musical minds, they assert, are fashioned by their own time; you can’t go home again. Yet Spanish viola da gambist Jordi Savall has taken up residence in the 16th and 17th centuries with seemingly unaffected ease. The unlikely result has been musical stardom.Mr. Savall was launched to prominence in 1991, when he played on the soundtrack of the film “All the Mornings of the World,” a fictional account of the lives of 17th-century viol musicians Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais. In France, where it was produced, 2 million viewers flocked to see the movie in the first year; the corresponding musical recording sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide.Tonight and on April 13 and 18, The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates Jordi Savall with a festival that will feature his three ensembles: Hesperion XXI, Le Concert des Nations, and La Capella Reial de Catalunya. Among the participating musicians will be Mr. Savall’s wife, singer Montserrat Figueras, as well as the couple’s son, Ferran, (a guitarist and theorbo player) and daughter, Arianna (a harpist).The instrument at the center of all of these activities is the viol, a predecessor of the violin and cello, lighter in construction and with a more delicate, reedy sound. Originating in Spain, it made its way across the Mediterranean to Italy, where it became an essential part of Renaissance musical life – played, according to one 16th-century account, by “gentlemen, merchants and other men of virtue.”The instrument’s attributes were particularly well suited to the age. “The viol can play very softly, and it has a long resonance, so it was considered the instrument that could best imitate the expressions of the human voice,” Mr. Savall told me recently. It is, he said, “the ideal instrument for intimacy. It sounds best when you are close and can hear every articulation and change of bow. And this is why, at the end of the 18th century, it was played less, because the halls became bigger and larger instruments were needed to fill them.”Jordi Savall’s interest in the viola da gamba, which, as the name implies, is held between the legs when played, was stirred while he was studying cello. Coming across music written for the earlier instrument, he found “that it was impossible to produce the right sound with a cello. The greater tension on the strings of a violin or cello produces a sound that projects well, but it is very black-and-white. With a viol, you can control the dynamic shadings and make the instrument ‘talk.'”There are other important differences. “The viol,” he relates, “was never ‘domesticated,’ if I can use that word. A modern orchestra is made up of instruments that can all play together in one homogenous group. The viola da gamba, on the other hand, is a little bit savage. You can’t get 10 of them to play one melody together. You can have a consort, of course, but each one will sound like a different voice.”This quality suits it to certain works better than others – and better than more modern instruments. “It is an instrument used particularly to express the tragic, when music is full of emotion or when there is intensity of counterpoint,” he said. “Bach, for example, employed the viola da gamba only once in the ‘St. John Passion’ – at the moment when Jesus is dying.”And what of “authenticity”? In “All the Mornings of the World,” Sainte-Colombe rejects Marais as a student because the latter demonstrates only technical brilliance, not the ability truly to make music. Can Mr. Savall go beyond mere notes to find the “soul” of early music?“It’s a good question,” he said. “But now let me ask you another. Do you think that over time all the mothers of the world have changed the things they’ve said to their children? Do you think the way a man says ‘I love you’ to a woman has changed fundamentally over the last million years? I think not. I think the essential things that concern emotional relations between people have remained the same throughout evolution. What has changed is only the manner.”“In Catalonia there are paintings from the 12th century that are very expressive. When you go to a 15th-century synagogue in Toledo, or a mosque in Cordoba – there is real emotion there, just as there is in all music that is beautiful. A simple Sephardic song contains as much beauty and emotion as a string quartet by Haydn. There are questions of style, and they can help us to realize the beauty – of course you need to learn about these things. But the capacity to be touched by the music is its real power.”Jordi Savall will perform with Hesperion XXI tonight at 8 p.m.; with Le Concert des Nations April 13 at 8 p.m.; and with La Capella Reial de Catalunya April 18 at 8 p.m. at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 83rd Street, 212-570-3949.)

The Renaissance Musician

The Renaissance Musician

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