“Music,” Jordi Savall writes in the liner note to one of his latest discs, Du temps et de l’instant (“Of Time and the Moment”), is “the true living history of humanity.” One could call Savall the true living history of music. Since founding his Barcelona-based Alia Vox label in 1998, the indefatigable Catalan viola da gamba player has released new performances at a dizzying rate, some four dozen discs already. Their range is equally intoxicating, from the 14th-century Annunciation drama Misteri d’Elx and music of the Sephardic Diaspora to Elizabethan Renaissance consort music (Anthony Holborne, Tobias Hume, William Lawes), Monteverdi, the Spanish Baroque, the French Baroque (M. de Ste. Colombe, Marin Marais, Jean-Baptiste Lully), Bach and Vivaldi and, later this month, Mozart. Even the Alia Vox packaging is an object lesson for the record industry: handsome folding cardboard sleeves with texts and literate notes (by Savall and others) in English, French, German, Italian, Castilian, and Catalan and no want of color photos. Savall was last in Boston in May 2004 in a chamber setting, but this Friday he comes to the Jesuit Urban Center in the South End with his Iberian instrumental and vocal ensembles, Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, for “Encounters of Fire and Air: Music of Old Spain and the New World,” and you can expect a combustible evening.
He did not, of course, spring full-fledged from the brow of Euterpe. Pascal Quignard, author of the novel Tous les matins du monde , recalls discovering Sainte Colombe from an LP by Savall and Wieland Kuijken that he bought in 1976. Quignard’s novel, the story of Sainte Colombe and Marin Marais, was the basis for the 1991 Alain Corneau film, for which Savall was the musical director; if you saw the movie or bought the soundtrack (on Alia Vox), you’ve heard Savall play. And you can find his earlier recordings — Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine , Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites, many more — on Astrée and EMI’s Veritas label.
But the newer releases have more gravitas in the phrasing and more kick in the rhythms. Back in August in these pages, I reviewed what was then the latest, Isabel I Reina de Castilla. Since then there’ve been a half-dozen more including discs devoted to Couperin, Boccherini (saluting the 200th anniversary of his death), Mozart (the 50th anniversary of his birth), and Don Quixote (the 400th anniversary of volume one). The Boccherini includes the same guitar quintet that Europa Galante perform on a 2003 Veritas disc; the Italians are more classical, Savall’s international Le Concert des Nations players more kinetic. The Mozart disc, also with Le Concert des Nations, offers Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Serenata notturna, the Notturno in D, and an uproarious rendering of Ein musikalischer Spaß (“A Musical Joke”), Wolfgang’s anticipation of P.D.Q. Bach. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quijote de la Mancha: Romances y Músicas is Savall’s most ambitious project yet, a two-disc set that comes in the form of a hardbound book that re-creates the novel’s considerable musical ambiance, alternating readings from the Spanish text with performances of music that Cervantes cites and other period works, such as Cristóbal de Morales’ Pie Jesu Domine for our hero’s death.
