From Spain, Jordi Savall

Spanish-born conductor, composer and viol player Jordi Savall has been a major figure in the field of Western early music since the 1970s. His career as a concert performer, teacher, researcher and creator of new musical and cultural projects makes him one of the principal architects of the current revaluation of historical music.

His mission has earned him worldwide renown, and his performances always brim with live emotion and spectacular creative vitality, while steadfastly remaining faithful to historical music. Savall began his musical studies when he was 6 years old as a singer in the Children’s Choir in Igualada (Catalonia), his hometown, and then he went on to learn the cello, completing his studies in the Barcelona Conservatory (1964). In 1965, he started to study the viola da gamba and early music. He moved on to start advanced studies in 1968 at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Switzerland). There, he succeeded his teacher August Wenzinger in 1973.

Together with the soprano Montserrat Figueras, he established the ensembles Hespèrion XXI (1974), La Capella Reial de Catalunya (1987) and Le Concert des Nations (1989). Savall has explored and fashioned a universe full of emotions and beauty, and has projected it to the world and to millions of music lovers. All the while, he reintroduced the viola da gamba and its music, which had fallen into oblivion, and thus became one of the most important champions of the early music.

With his key contribution to Alain Corneau’s film “Tous les Matins du Monde” (winner of a César for best soundtrack), his busy concert life (more than 140 concerts a year) and recording schedule (averaging six releases annually) and with the creation of his own record label Alia Vox (1998), Savall demonstrates that the early music does not have to be elitist and can appeal to a younger and wider public.

Notable in his operatic repertoire are his participation in the rediscovery of Una cosa rara (performed in 1991) and Il burbero di buon cuore (performed in 1995 and 2012) by Vicente Martín y Soler. In 1993, Savall presented Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for the first time at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona (in 2002, it was recorded by BBC/Opus Arte and released on DVD). He also has conducted Farnace by Vivaldi at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid (2001), Bordeaux (2003), Vienna (2005), Paris (2007) and released on CD by Alia Vox. He also has conducted J.J. Fux’s Orfeo ed Euridice, performed at the Styriarte Festival in Graz in 2010, and Vivaldi’s Il Teuzzone performed in 2011 in a semi-concert version at the Opéra Royal de Versailles.

With members of Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Jordi Savall will perform works by Monteverdi, Dowland, Holborne and Scheidt in an SCP Chamber Music concert Oct. 8.