The New York Times
May 4, 2010
Jerusalem’s Vast Story, Conveyed in Music
By ALLAN KOZINN
Jordi Savall made his reputation by helping resurrect the viola da
gamba, but he has refused to become a prisoner of the instrument.
Though he still plays it onstage, and as beautifully as ever, these
days he is mainly a hybrid musicologist, performer and entrepreneur
with a specialty in assembling and directing thematic programs,
typically on subjects that do not seem obvious until he has turned his
hand to them.
His current fascination is Jerusalem -‘ specifically, what its
variegated musical traditions and its place in the European musical
imagination tell us about the city’s fraught history and, perhaps, its
destiny. For `Jerusalem,’ a two-CD set housed in a lavish hardcover
book (released in 2009 on his own Alia Vox label), Mr. Savall
ingeniously, and diplomatically, marshaled a huge body of material,
drawing on Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources to produce a
compelling overview of Jerusalem’s musical and religious life over the
last 3,000 years.
Mr. Savall brought that recording to life at the Rose Theater on
Monday evening in `Jerusalem: City of Heavenly and Earthly Peace,’
offered as the concluding event in a mini-festival that began on
Saturday evening. As on the recording, he supplemented his own
ensembles, Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, with
Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, Greek and Armenian musicians versed in
the accents of their peoples’ music. And as is often the case with
Mr. Savall’s work, the live performance, which embraced improvisation
in several of the ornate vocal and instrumental pieces, had a vigor
that outstripped the already vital performances on the recording.
The program was arranged in seven sections, with discrete groups that
illustrated Jerusalem’s changing status as a predominantly Jewish,
Christian or Muslim city, but also showing it as pilgrimage site for
the faithful of all three religions and as a `City of Refuge and
Exile’ over the last five centuries.
A touch of ecumenical utopianism frames these glimpses: the program
begins with prophecies of the Last Judgment and the establishment of
the kingdom of heaven from all three faiths and ends with a prayer for
peace from each tradition. In the finale, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek
versions of the same folk song are performed separately and then
overlaid as Mr. Savall’s way of showing the unifying power of music.
That unity is conveyed in other ways too. A few of the Christian works
– particularly a conductus, `O totius Asie Gloria’; a French
crusaders’ song, `Chevalier, mult estes guariz’; and `O ffondo do mar
tan chão’ from the `Cantigas de Santa Maria’ – are couched in the
familiar modes of European medieval music. But the Jewish, Arabic and
Armenian pieces share a highly decorative Middle Eastern style, rich
in what a modern Western listener might describe as microtonality and
pitch bending.
The highlights were many, but among the most striking were `Sallatu
Allah,’ a joyful Arabic choral prayer with a freewheeling instrumental
accompaniment; the Armenian `Lament for the City of Ani,’ sung by
Razmyk Amyan; and Montserrat Figueras’s alluring accounts of several
pieces, including a Greek prophetic text at the start of the show and
a Sephardic song, `Palestina hermoza y Santa,’ in the second half.
Curiously, one of the most moving performances was not by Mr. Savall
and company but by Shlomo Katz, by way of a 1950 recording of – `El
male rahamim,’ a Hebrew memorial prayer, with an amended text that
refers to the Holocaust.
Some of what Mr. Savall offered was conjectural. No musical settings
of the Psalms survive from King David’s time, but the Israeli singer
Lior Elmaleh based his performances on Jewish chant from Morocco that
may preserve the contours of the ancient style. And the `Fanfare of
Jericho’ is Mr. Savall’s own composition: a cacophonous chorus of
shofars (the ram’s horns used as trumpets in ancient times and still
heard during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services) offered at both
ends of the program.
It repeats his broader message. At the beginning of the program, the
shofars, deployed onstage and in the balconies, are presented as the
trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho. At the end, the
shofar players on the left side of the stage and performers using
brass trumpets on the right create a din that Mr. Savall intends to be
less warlike. This version, called `Against the Barriers of the
Spirit,’ is meant to suggest that just as music brought down the walls
of Jericho, it might bring down obstacles to peace. Naïve, perhaps,
but a nice thought.
Jordi Savall and his expanded ensemble will perform `Jerusalem: City
of Heavenly and Earthly Peace’ on Wednesday evening at the Sanders
Theater at Harvard University, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass.;
(617) 496-2222, ofa.fas.harvard.edu.
05/05/arts/music/05savall.html
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/