Review: Cambridge Music Festival: Jordi Savall Trio: Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge

At Trinity College Chapel on Saturday night (15 March), the current Cambridge Music Festival programme offered an opportunity to welcome celebrated conductor, composer and viol player, Jordi Savall, the distinguished elder statesman of early music.

Savall, who popularised the viol da gamba of which he became professor at the Basel Schola Cantorum, was accompanied by Xavier Diaz-Latorre (theorbo and guitar) and David Mayoral (percussion).

In addition to a command of music history, Savall has a wide-ranging knowledge of non-western musical traditions, such as those of Africa and the Middle-East, and is the recipient of multi high-profile awards.

His programme on Saturday evening was music from the C16th and C17th Spanish ‘Golden Age’.

The repertoire was probably unfamiliar or unknown to most of us in the packed chapel, so there was an element of instruction involved in the concert, and who better to deliver it than Jordi Savall?

The music comprised mainly folias and canarios, the former associated with popular characters, shepherds or peasants taking part in wild, frenetic singing and dancing, often verging on ‘madness’, and the latter, similar but sometimes more risqué, and both at the centre of European instrumental traditions.

Savall is an ambassador for the power and importance of music. He stresses its ability to take on a new life every time the musician or singer performs it.

Music, he believes, feeds the memory and is a source of peace and harmony as well as being the earliest form of human expression.

He would be in sympathy no doubt with the C19th essayist and aesthete Walter Pater’s famous dictum: “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”.

And here the historical context is interesting. For example, the opening ‘word’ of the Old English epic poem Beowulf – Hwaet – is unlikely to be a word at all but rather the striking of a stringed instrument to call attention to a poem about to be sung or recited.

In fact we still call the words of songs ‘lyrics,’ probably because they were originally given expression to the accompaniment of a harp or a lyre.

Expressiveness pervaded every tune in the concert, every dance, gesture and improvisation performed by the violist and the two super-accomplished musicians who make up the Jordi Savall Trio.

Xavier Diaz-Latore was a veritable force of nature with some simply astounding guitar solos, and David Mayoral, an unerringly accurate omnipresence, often accompanying his drums with a fascinating series of sounds made with bells and whistles.

Savall, of course, was the focus of the performance, and although now 83 has lost none of the vigour required for this music or indeed his ability to sustain it for over 90 minutes.

Very special was to witness the care and loving attention he bestowed on his precious instrument when not himself performing.

First laying the viol on a silk scarf on his chair, and then delicately placing a strip of red silk over its fretboard.

Once or twice he got the sequence of the programme wrong (accidentally on purpose?), but he played some wonderful things, occasionally slow showpieces which were absolutely mesmerising.

It was difficult in the absence of light to follow the order of the programme’s sets, but it didn’t matter. The audience was happy simply to gaze on in wonder.

For all the excitement though there was throughout (and required by the music) a judicious understatement in the Trio’s performance, a manner so delicate and precise as to be difficult to analyse or describe, a subtlety that has obviously taken Savall a lifetime to achieve.

This was music that came straight from the heart of its composers and practitioners, and judging by the reception the Trio received had touched the hearts of its audience, too.

Inevitably, there was a standing acclamation of many minutes and enough, one hopes, to assure this global superstar and his accompanists that their return to Cambridge would be one very much to anticipate.