Texte paru dans: / Appeared in:
*  
GRAMOPHONE - August 1997 (pages 15-16)
Reproduced from Gramophone Archives
Pour s'abonner / Subscription information

Michael Quinn

Baton or bow

Michael Quinn went to meet a musician whose fame in recent years was assured by a film about Marin Marais and Sainte-Colombe, the Catalan viol-player and conductor Jordi Savall.

The American novelist and travel writer James A. Michener once likened a journey eastwards across the Spanish plain to Barcelona to "a meal that begins with a good red wine and ends with the most sparkling of champagnes". Approaching the vibrant Catalonian capita] from the north by air offers an experience of no less a vintage quality. Resting on the sheltered basin between the snow-capped Pyrenees and the sun-scorched Balearic Sea on the western edge of the Mediterranean, Barcelona is a dynamic modern city with a history that stretches back thousands of years. As the main conduit through which thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe traded with Africa and Asia, its trading prowess once dominated the region and its reach rivalled the mighty Italian cities of Venice and Genoa for political and financial influence. The melting-pot culture that developed in the area acquired a unique flavour, coloured, scented and shaped by the empires that came and went - the Carthaginians, Romans and Moors - and by the traders who came and stayed. Today the region's rich Catalan heritage is undergoing something of a renaissance. Having regained regional autonomy in the first flush of post Franco democracy in 1978, Catalonia has begun once again to celebrate an identity unlike any other in Europe. Though that new found confidence is the result of many factors, it is nowhere more vividly personified than in the achievements and ambitions of Jordi Savall, the charismatic Igualada-born viola da gamba player, conductor, researcher and teacher, whose constant touring and more than 100 recordings-60plus of those for Auvidis - have imbued him with iconoclastic status as someone who not only returned the music of Catalonia to the common realm but also legitimately, solidly situated it in the context of a thousand years of European composition.

Cocooned in a corner of his favourite hometown restaurant, the contemplative, soft-spoken Savall has an endearing shyness that fits perfectly the side of him that confesses to a compulsion for collecting old books and admits to regularly losing track of the time while searching for even older scores in library vaults. But there's a discernible energy, too: a hungry, searching, good-humoured, quick-witted energy that wants to do things, many things, and do them all well. It's an energy that has given Savall a profile in Europe sharply in contrast to his relative anonymity in the UK despite the astonishing success of Tous les matins do monde, Alain Corneau's intense and intimate 1992 film about the guarded relationship between Marin Marais and Sainte-Colombe. Savall's soundtrack recording has so far sold in excess of 650,000 copies and continues to sell. "The film was a beautiful, fascinating experience and it made it possible for a lot of people to discover the world of baroque music," Savall says with quiet satisfaction. "That so many people are now also playing the viola da gamba is really very flattering, and very nice too.”

Though nothing in Savall's recording schedule promises to repeat the phenomenal if somewhat freakish success of Tons les matins do monde, this month sees an important development (not least for the opportunity it offers to penetrate deeper into the British record-buying market than ever before) with the latest significant batch of releases on Fontalis, a new label under the Auvidis aegis dedicated to Savall's not inconsiderable output as soloist, collaborator with his wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras and that of the three ensembles he has been shaping and guiding since 1974, Hespérion XX, La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations.

Fontalis, Latin for "back to the source", has been created to accommodate and rationalize Savall's extraordinarily wide range of repertoire interests. Its output will be determined according to the five geographical areas of musical interest - Spain, France, Britain, Germany and Italy - that afford a sharper focus than blurred chronological or musicological definitions allow him in a repertoire that spans the full stretch of a thousand years. While the emphasis will be on Savall as performer-conductor, Fontalis will also make it easier if not essential - for him to turn his hand to producing as well. "It's the logical next step for me," he admits, "and it's an area I shall be working in more and more in the future because my philosophy is that you can only do things well if you first take responsibility for doing them yourself."

One senses that Savall has always been something of a producer-manqué. His first recording on the Auvidis Astrée label in 1976 Couperin's Pièces de violes - was, he says, his first happy experience in the studio. Prior to that there had been too many battles with companies whose knee-jerk solution to studio problems was extra technology rather than extra time. "They insisted on too many microphones or on complicated mixing desks that made my sound seem so different it wasn't possible to continue working with them. With Astrée it was different. They allowed me to do what I wanted to get the sound I wanted." And they seemed able to accommodate Savall's vehement belief that, "time is all important, cost is of no importance". Yet, for all his insistence on extended preparation - "I never record any score that I haven't carried around with me for at least two years" and his time consuming refusal to be rushed in studio - "In three days what can you do? Rehearse, maybe, but balance? No. And record? Absolutely not!" -. his 21-year association with Auvidis has seen a less than sluggish average of three discs issued each year. That level of activity has honed Savall's studio savvy to the point where he now insists that less is more.

"Experience has taught me that the more technically sophisticated you allow the recording process to become, the more you change the experience for both performer and listener. Now, I take as much time as I need to find the natural sound and I only ever use two stereo microphones placed in a natural position relative to the performer— not too far, not too close - to reproduce it." Editing is low on the list of priorities, too. "I try to avoid it where possible. Change a note and you change the music."

SavaIl's first Astrée recording was made with the "ensemble of soloists" which Savall formed with Montserrat Figueras, in 1974 Hespèrion XX. The group's name derives from a Greek word meaning "from the west" and gives an indication of their repertoire interests. By then Savall had been specializing in early music for nearly a decade, regularly collaborating with the Barcelona-based Ars Musicae while continuing to study at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basle. In 1966, preparing for an American television recording of Spanish songs with Victoria de los Angeles, he had trawled the British Museum and libraries in Paris for background material, unaware of the treasures he was about to stumble upon. "I found names that were completely new to me - Marais, Couperin, Forqueray, Delalande and every score I opened held something magical and brilliant in it. It was a shock to see how neglected they had been and just how many there were. It was like manna from heaven. Suddenly I had this curiosity, this interest that could not be satisfied or stopped.

"In many respects I was self taught. All the things I learned about the viol I learned from reading original scores. There was no conception when I began of what this music was, how it fitted into the repertoire or what it could sound like. The only way for me to learn those things was daily to take my viol, open a score, start at the first page and, without any idea of what I should be doing, begin playing. While playing, I was listening all the time, trying to understand, thinking, changing, listening, each day, every day. After a while, things became clear."

There were isolated voices elsewhere, few and very far between, whispering if not exactly crying in the wilderness and Savall particularly acknowledges the pioneering work of Arnold Dolmetsch as a happy and useful bolster. But, if he was to learn more, he came to realize, performance and polemic had to go hand-in-hand. "My argument then, as now, is that there are only two types of music: sleeping music and contemporary music. Sleeping music is the music left forgotten in libraries; contemporary music is the music we play now, today. I see no reason to treat music differently just because the composer was born in 1645 rather than 1845 or 1945."

For the majority of British reviewers - with the honourable exception of Gramophone's reviewers who lavished praise on the recent volumes of Purcell Fantasias (9/96) and early sixteenth-century Valencian court songs, "El Canconer del Duc de Calabria" (9/96) - it has been Savall's cross-border excursions rather than his time-travelling exploits that have proved most problematic and he is expecting more furrowed brows and gnashing of critical teeth in response to this month's issues of English viol music and orchestral suites from Purcell's Fairy Queen.

"They say there is too much personality in our playing, but how can that be otherwise if you are true to the music? You don't get much stronger personalities than Tobias Hume, John Jenkins, Dowland and Purcell. The English viol consort was begun by people who had been to - or were influenced by the music coming out of - Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe and where there was a different dimension to the language. It was that mix of national styles and identities that created the 'English' viol sound. Dowland is the perfect example of that. Or think of John Cooper who even changed his name to Coprario [and taught Charles I and William and Henry Lawes on his return to England]. Imagine how rich and full their music must have sounded when they played it. And imagine how they might have played together!"

As Savall's interests broadened through the 1970s and 1980s, the need to create a vocal ensemble became paramount. The voice had always been important to him. He recalls the eight years he spent in his school choir until his voice broke at the age of 14 as "my most important musical training, much more so than the [Barcelona] Conservatoire and things I did later because singing teaches you about music in a very direct way. When my voice broke I was outraged at the injustice of losing it."

Returning to Barcelona from Basel in 1986, he formed La Capella Reial de Catalunya.

"The voice is as important as any instrument we use and so it has to be treated with the same seriousness and respect. Every voice has a colour which is determined by the physical being of the singer and by the language you speak. The voice contains its own 'song', a tune, rhythm, pitch, inflexion that comes from the mother tongue and, while you can sometimes disguise it, you can never cheat it. For a Catalan like myself it takes a lot of work to sing in another tongue - Italian, German, Portuguese, English - because they are so intrinsically different from each other. And on top of that, you have to separate the individual national styles of instrumental playing and of vocal performance, which can be difficult enough to recognize let alone to actually do."

That explains, perhaps, why Savall feels comfortable recording the orchestral part of The Fairy Queen but adamantly shies away from directing any of the vocal sections. "1 would never agree to that. Not even if you offered me all the money in the world, because I know that all the crucial vocal elements are simply so very foreign to me.

For all the theoretical and historical erudition that underpins

Savall's performance practice, he is also nothing if not an instinctive musician. A central issue in approaching new repertoire is whether or not it is music he feels he can grow into. Mere familiarity is nothing, intimacy all. In real terms it's a principle that has also shaped the constituency of his collaborators. Professional associations go back a quarter of a century and more in some instances and Savall appreciates "the security, the foundation it gives me even before we start to play together". Though he leads from the front, Savall also leads by example. He recognizes that just as he would be loathe to lose his identity within a larger ensemble, so too would others and he argues in any case that "the best and honest way" to make music is to allow musicians to make their own individual contributions to the whole. Such enlightened practice pays dividends too, for the sum of the parts in any Savall recording is always greater than the sum of the whole.

"An orchestra should have the same system of working as a string quartet: the impulse to produce a conversational richness of contrasts. The concept of homogeneity is a romantic concept; it began in the nineteenth century and belongs there. In earlier times an ensemble was a mix of different sounds that came together to create something unified but recognizably made up of all their different colours, shapes and voices. If you apply that approach to music you think you know, the new sounds you hear can be very surprising."

And that's precisely what Savall has done with his first foray into nineteenth-century repertoire, bringing a new, rather sharp, rather pacy focus to bear on Beethoven's mighty Eroica (reviewed by Richard Osborne last month). The choice may surprise but it hints at something of a private agenda at work - a setting straight of the record. "It is a very personal thing to attempt to interpret Beethoven with all his richness, contrast and depth of sound. For me, Beethoven is one of the composers who has been abused on the concert platform in order to make great conductors."

The recording with the suitably titled multinational Le Concert des Nations was never originally planned, the suggestion only coming at the end of a successful concert tour. Though it may have insinuated itself rather than being invited into the studio, it is, Savall insists, a logical development for him. "If you have an instrument -and the orchestra is an instrument— the full possibilities it offers begin to make themselves known to you as you progress through the repertoire from whatever point you want to start to whatever point you wish to finish. 1 came to the nineteenth century via the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth, which is how I think it ought to be. The problem with nineteenth-century repertoire is that most people come to it from the twentieth century - completely the wrong direction! You can only understand the new when it takes you by surprise, when you haven't seen it before because it hasn't been there before. In the twentieth century, we've seen everything, we're familiar with everything, we think we understand the function of everything because it seems as if it has always been there. But that's not so. Many times I've been surprised by conductors who don't seem able to accept that in performance they should not be aware of things that haven't yet happened.

"Le Concert des Nations was an opportunity for me to address these issues. I also wanted to create the circumstances where I could give enough time and energy to a proper investigation of how an orchestra produces the sounds it does. You cannot play the notes if you don't understand what they are supposed to be communicating and how they fit together. The issue is to find how to play the music true to the style of the period in which it was composed and true to its generic structures and contours. A note is just a sound and music that is just a collection of sounds is not music, however pretty they might be. The emotional sense has to be there and to Find that takes time."

Time and space are things the infant Fontalis label can provide for Savall in abundance. But, should it and the Eroica be seen as a daring bridgehead into hitherto deliberately neglected territory? Is Savall to be the latest early music specialist to forage ever deeper into the nineteenth century where, its champions jealously insist, the grass is greener and the harvests potentially richer? Not if he can help it.

"I detest these labels, these categories, these silly obligations other people place on you. I'm a musician. The only specialism I have is the viola da gamba, all of the rest is love. I'm just trying to play beautiful music in the way that it should be played. It happens that I believe that the closer you get to the ideas of the composer, the greater chance you have of an honest interpretation; of performing the music the way it ought to be played. It's really a very simple concept."

Cliquez l'un ou l'autre bouton pour découvrir bien d'autres critiques de CD
 Click either button for many other reviews