Arts News

Just like heaven

Known to cinema fans from his soundtrack for the 1991 film Tous les Matins du Monde/All the Mornings of the World, composer Jordi Savall’s 40-year career combines scholarship, entertainment, and visionary goodwill with virtuoso performances both in concert and on hundreds of recordings, many from his own label, Alia Vox. Often, his recording projects explore themes, crossing geographic boundaries, like “Lux Feminae” (“Feminine Light,” theme of his recent Town Hall Seattle concert) or “Diaspora Sefardí.”
With his characteristic blend of deep research and virtuosic performance, historical accuracy and jazz-like improvisation, Savall and his band have created in “Jerusalem: City of Heavenly and Earthly Peace” a mesmerizing and troubling contemporary performance piece. Maestro Savall, esteemed creator of more than 160 honored recordings of early music, combines ancient instruments, chants, recitations of sacred texts, folk tunes and even a Sufi dance in his concert (based on his 2008 two-CD set of the same name), which I was privileged to see performed on May 5 as the focus of a three-day “Jerusalem” event at New York’s Lincoln Center. I wanted to share with you some impressions and some thoughts about this most unusual Savall project.
Silhouetted against a huge dawn-like screen, a robed man blows an immensely long, grandly twisted shofar, the flawless opening notes of a fanfare that expands to include half a dozen players of these beautiful ram’s horns and as many players of the equally long, impossibly slender Arabic trumpets called annafirs. The shofar, a wake-up call most associated in our time with synagogue High Holiday services, is played by the Israeli virtuoso Yagel Harel, one of a collection of multi-ethnic players Savall has carefully gathered to demonstrate how historic enemies can melt their differences in the warm light of their musical similarities.
As he confessed in a pre-concert discussion, Maestro Savall departed from his usual approach to ensemble-building when he set about to create “Jerusalem.” To his regular forces — La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Hesperion XXI — he insisted on adding, not simply the best players, but the best players from specific backgrounds: two oud masters — one Israeli, one Iraqi; three chant masters — Sephardic Jewish, Palestinian Arab, and Armenian; players of percussion, harps, bells, and flutes representing most of the Middle East, plus “The Trumpets of Jericho” — those shofars and annafirs, joined by the drumming of tambours.
What to make of this sophisticated musical time machine, a chronological scrapbook of spiritual longings created by a virtuoso of immense good will? Themed around the city at the center of so much terrifying talk, Savall’s “Jerusalem: City of Heavenly and Earthly Peace” aims at nothing less than demonstrating that peace is possible.
As Yo-Yo Ma (who showed up in the “Jerusalem” series audience) has reminded us with his Silk Road project, as the late Isaac Stern demonstrated when he went to China, musicians are masters of peace, intuitive communicators of wordless truths that transcend boundaries. Laying aside the question of how this kind of interpersonal, one-on-one peacemaking might or might not translate onto that other stage where history performs, consider this an effort by one man to contribute what he can to healing the wounds of his time.
Ambitious in its historical scope (5,000 years in two hours), “Jerusalem” travels chronologically through the music of the city’s ancient, and less ancient, rulers. The show divides into chapters, like acts of a play, with dramatic readings in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Arabic and French, supplemented by giant supertitles. Heartbreaking laments are sung: in Hebrew, in Lior Elmaleh’s twining Sephardic sound; in Armenian, in the sublimely sweet tenor of Razmk Aman; in Arabic, in the haunting echo of Muwafak Shahin Khalil’s chant. And in the middle of it all, a devastating reading, in French, of the papal edict that started the catastrophe known as the Crusades.