Having undertaken his initial training on the cello at the conservatory of his home town Barcelona, Jordi Savall’s early interest in the viola da gamba then took him to the Schola Cantorum in Basle to study this instrument with August Wenzinger, whom he subsequently succeeded. Savall began to build a reputation as one of the key musicians in the revival of early music almost immediately. Hespèrion XX, which he founded with his late wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras (the ensemble renamed itself Hespèrion XXI in 2000 as an acknowledgement of the new millennium), has a solid reputation for scholarship permeating its practical activities, performing in a way that integrates widespread use of improvisatory techniques, especially in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish music and troubadour music of the thirteenth century. In 1987 Savall returned to Barcelona, forming La Capella Reial de Catalunya, a vocal group with whom he recorded a variety of music by composers such as Victoria, Guerrero, and Monteverdi. Two years later he formed Le Concert des Nations, a period instrument orchestra with whom he explored music up to and including the classical era. Many of its players are of what Savall describes as an individualistic ‘Mediterranean temperament’, so that they all play like soloists within the ensemble. Savall’s record company Alia Vox was started in order to produce recordings by these three ensembles, and indeed to maintain total control over the process of committing their performances to disc.

Savall’s music making as a youngster was centred around singing plainchant and early polyphony, which perhaps explains why he (like the Kuijken brothers) comes across as such a natural artist in the field of early music. His performances on the examples selected here from his extensive discography reveal viol playing of the utmost confidence. All display now-familiar characteristics of period performance: clarity of tone modulated by extensive use of tempo flexibility, agogic accentuation, ornamentation (including some especially fine trills in his 1977 Bach sonatas) and judicious use of an ornamental vibrato according to the period principles rediscovered in recent decades. Savall is keen for more specialist music institutions to provide expert tuition in period performance, pointing out ‘…it’s a big repertoire, and you cannot put 600 years of music history in a small section of a normal conservatory.’

Playing the lead part, Savall brings spice to Diferencias sobre las Folias (1976; attributed to eighteenth-century Spanish musician Antonio Martín y Coll) with a particularly wide range of quasi-improvisatory techniques, making it an outstandingly successful and pioneering approach to style; Savall admits that, at the time, he and his colleagues were deliberately ‘revolutionary’ in their approach. Most listeners will recognise the main theme here in its more well-known guise as set by Corelli in his ‘La Folia’ Violin Sonata.

It was Savall’s playing on the soundtrack to Alain Corneau’s 1991 film Tous les matins du monde (about the life and work of Marin Marais) that brought him to a wider public consciousness; the item of Marais’s music chosen here, La Brillante, demonstrates the essence of Savall’s ethos as an early music specialist as he communicates the beauty and vitality of this dance-inspired movement through exquisitely placed ornaments and rhythmic nuance.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)