Jordi Savall

My feature article on Jordi Savall appears in the current (7-13 Apr) issue of Time Out New York.

Maestro Savall is honored this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a series of three concerts and a screening of "Tous les matins du monde." For tickets and program details, visit this page.

Given the maestro's austere air and my absolute reverence for him, I was intimidated at the prospect of interviewing him. Instead, he turned out to be a sweet, whimsical gentleman with an easy laugh and a passion for all kinds of music.

When we spoke of Pablo Casals, he slipped into the present tense:

He speaks to the instrument, he sings, he dances. His body and soul are together with it. The other thing, maybe more important [for me], was the fact that Pablo Casals discovered in a shop Bach's six suites for cello. In this moment, nobody had played this music. People thought they were exercises, not complete music. He studied this music *ten years* before he played it in concert. Then, he started to say to the world: Listen to this music. It's beautiful.

Now I realize that in a certain way, when I started to play older music in addition to the normal repertory, it was in fact a reaction to say: I have to find my six suites! And my Bach suites were Marin Marais, in a certain way.

He also mentioned Victoria de los Angeles as an important influence, particularly since he met his wife, Montserrat Figueras, when both played on the soprano's "Songs of Andalusia" disc with the Barcelona Ars Musicae.

I asked him about his AliaVox label—whether anyone had told him he could not run a viable business while issuing beautifully recorded and sumptuously packaged discs of arcane and demanding music. "Yes, I know this!" he answered with an uproarious laugh. (As it happens, AliaVox has sold more than one million discs since 1998.)

Here is an ample and beautifully documented discography for Maestro Savall. If you don't own it already, you need his sublime set entitled Le parnasse de la viole. See also Bradley Bambarger's superb article in the Newark Star-Ledger.