Not Only Opera

A Mediterranean Mystery: Jordi Savall at the Wigmore Hall

Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI
Wigmore Hall
Stalls G16, £5 (under-35)
29 October 2017
Wigmore page

I had a phase in which I only listened to early music (and Don Giovanni), of which Jorid Savall was a hero. Not that I actually listened to much of what he did, but the one disc I had and the odd pieces I heard on the radio convinced me he was a radical of historically informed performance, an adventurous life-giver to music of which we have such little record. When this passion for early music was shelved in the spare room of my mind, his name continued to throb and glow whenever touched upon by my consciousness, incubated and preserved from experience.

So you can imagine my excitement before this concert. I eagerly craned from my seat to catch a glimpse of the range of viols the great Jordi would play, to see if I recognized any of the reedy instruments on the table by his side. I didn’t. This should have been a warning but I heeded it not. The two-hour concert and ensuing suite of encores were lesson enough, though: this is music that, for my level of knowledge, is best consumed in those odd pieces heard on the radio, or at the most in a single CD of presumably closer overlap with music with which I am more familiar. In short, I went speedily from ecstasy to a battle with snoozedom.

This is my failing rather than anyone else’s. The all-male band of Hespèrion XXI are accomplished musicians deeply familiar with the musical styles employed and with the ensemble. I would name the mournful player of the mysterious reeds, and the calmly flashy player of the zither-like thing, as particularly good, but alas I know not their names and the internet yields them not. The band as a whole is surprisingly dependent on Jordi, searching his impassive face for guidance between sections; and their improvisatory skits were oddly disjunct from the surrounding context – but perhaps this is par for the course for the music recorded by the 17th-century polyglot Moldavian soldier Dimitrie Cantemir, who provided the music for this evening. I simply don’t know.

I am now very thoroughly aware, though, that I am too ignorant about the different musical forms of the Mediterranean to be able to determine when a melody is played in the Turkish style and when in the Bulgarian. The consequent effect is of hearing essentially the same short piece, with variations of orchestration, continuously for two hours. So this wasn’t the concert for me, and I take full responsibility for leaving that Jordi hero throbbing away in my mind unexposed. But I will nevertheless gripe that the Wigmore could perhaps have encouraged Hespèrion to perform music closer to the repertory for which the Wigmore is better known. Although perhaps this would have gone against the spirit of the thing.