Jordi Savall Talks About Grief, Memory and Building Bridges
To marry the heart and the head By Julius Purcell . May 12, 2012 1:23 am The prolific Catalan musician Jordi Savall talks about grief, memory and building bridges ©Laia Abrill Jordi Savall at home in Barcelona It was a sound that few who heard it are likely to forget. In January, the church of Santa María del Mar in Barcelona was packed for the memorial concert of the singer Montserrat Figueras, who died last year aged 69. At the front, seated at the viola da gamba, Figueras’s husband Jordi Savall waited motionless as Armenian duduks launched into an opening lament. Then, from a balcony lit by three candles, came the voice of Figueras herself – “smoky, penetrating, flatly expressive”, as the music writer Alex Ross has described it. What we were hearing was one of her recordings of the Chant of the Sybil, a medieval Catalan text that she particularly loved. It was a charged moment, tinged with the realisation that recordings might endure, but the chance to hear this voice in performance had gone for ever. When I meet Jordi Savall a few months later, he is in the middle of producing a new disc that will tell the story, in music, of the humanist thinker Erasmus. The recording session in a chapel had finished at six that morning, Savall having returned only two days ago from an exhausting tour of Mexico and China with Hespèrion XXI, the ensemble he co-founded with Figueras in 1974. Six months after his wife’s death, and having turned 70 last year, Savall won’t, or can’t, slow down.
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