The Visionary
Portrait of Jordi Savall The Visionary Portrait of Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall, viol player and conductor, is exceptional from every point of view. Almost single-handedly, he brought the viol back to international popularity. He has uncovered countless lost renaissance and baroque treasures, founded three famous early music ensembles, and is in demand as a teacher and as a composer. A portrait

Jordi Savall has little time for the labels. “I’m a musician,” he states baldly. “My specialist area is the viola da gamba.” Savall was still a young man when, having only recently discovered the cello, he began to scour libraries and second-hand bookshops in Paris in the 1960s in his quest for unknown works. There, he stumbled upon previously-neglected pieces for the viola da gamba, a fascinating instrument that outwardly resembles the cello but which has up to six or even seven strings and demands a very different playing technique. Savall explored this novel musical world with the help of historical treatises, largely self-taught, until he was accepted as a student at the famous Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where he has taught himself since 1974.

Curiosity and openness

Savall’s entire life as an artist has been characterized by his curiosity about unknown areas of the repertory and by an urge to undertake research into those areas: “Discovering a forgotten work is like opening a window on a lost soul.” He is particularly interested in the traditional music of his Catalan homeland, although he generally seeks to locate it within a global context: many of his programmes reflect the history of Spain as a trading nation and as a colonial power as well as focusing on Spain’s encounters with the Muslim and Jewish worlds in the Near East.

“The enemies of humanity”, says Savall, “are ignorance, hatred and egoism.” He seeks to combat these trends in society through his social and artistic commitment. Of signal importance in this context are not only his programming decisions but also the makeup of his ensembles, which bring together musicians from different cultures and diverse musical traditions.  “It is fundamentally wrong to draw a distinction between classical music and folk music or traditional music,” he explains; “this is an unnatural distinction”. In all of these types of music the different generations can learn from one another.

Savall formed Le Concert des Nations in 1989. It is the only orchestra in the world that is consciously made up of equal numbers of younger and older – and more experienced – players, most of whom come from Latin America and from those parts of Europe that speak Romance languages. Savall pursues a similar pedagogic strategy with his Capella Reial de Catalunya Choir and his specialist ensemble Capella Nacional de Catalunya, which was formed in 2021 and which is devoted to historically informed performance practice, in which capacity it has repeatedly garnered superlatives. 

Music as a bridge

For many years Savall’s muse and closest artistic partner was his wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras, who from 1974 onwards played a significant role in the direction and development of all three of his major ensembles. She died in 2011, at which point Savall was on the verge of abandoning music entirely. Instead, he decided to remain faithful to her artistic vision of music as a bridge between different cultures: “Performing music is essentially a wordless gesture of love that is utterly existential and indispensable for us to be happy.”

Savall’s musical cosmos extends far beyond the world of early music: his concert performances and his recordings, which have been acclaimed by public and press alike, include orchestral works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schubert as well as a complete cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies. This music, too, is invariably interpreted in the spirit of historically informed performance practice – but in a way that is far removed from any dogmatic historicism. “Authenticity is relative, and art is not a science,” says Savall.

Even performances on period instruments using performance techniques from the past can provide only an approximation of the music of bygone centuries. “There is no machine that tells us whether what we are doing is fifty, sixty or even one hundred percent authentic,” he says. A combination of a knowledge of the history of music, a delight in experimentation and the utmost technical sovereignty are required before we can take decisions that are theoretically and musically sound and that open up a fresh approach to works that are several centuries old. At the heart of Savall’s music-making is his desire to allow modern listeners to enter the emotional world of early music.