Review: Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI

Published May 6, 2010 at 8:33 p.m.
“Jerusalem: The City of the Two Peaces,” live At Sanders Theatre, May 5, 2010...
"You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid.” “Here” for T.S. Eliot was a church in Huntingdonshire, but it’s hard to imagine a place where prayer has been more valid than Jerusalem, or a place where more people have died for their faith...

THE “JERUSALEM” ENSEMBLE Too bad more politicians aren’t musicians.

“You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid.” “Here” for T.S. Eliot was a church in Huntingdonshire, but it’s hard to imagine a place where prayer has been more valid than Jerusalem, or a place where more people have died for their faith. Back in 2008, Catalan gambist and early-music superstar Jordi Savall released, on his own Alia Vox label, Jerusalem: The City of the Two Peaces: Heavenly Peace and Earthly Peace, another of his mind-boggling book/CD projects. (Predecessors include Miguel Cervantes: Don Quijote de la Mancha: Romances y Músicas, Paraísos Perdidos: Christophorus Columbus, and Francisco Javier: The Route to the Orient.) This one offered the usual two CDs (with two and a half hours’ worth of music) accompanying a 436-page book in eight languages (French, Castilian, English, Catalan, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic) detailing the history of the Holy City (from the Canaanites to the Hebrews, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Saracens, Turks, and Brits), and the three faiths — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — that have fought over it, and the music that they’ve created, music that stitches sundered humanity back together.

And that was the program that Savall, his Hespèrion XXI and Capella Reial de Catalunya ensembles, the Palestinian Sufi troupe Al-Darwish, and guests from Israel, Armenia, Greece, and Iraq brought to Harvard’s Sanders Theatre last night, under the auspices of the Boston Early Music Festival. The last time Savall was in town, in October 2008, he offered a program of European dance music with just a handful of musicians. For “Jerusalem,” he brought most of the performers from the CDs — at one point, there were two dozen musicians playing on the Sanders stage, and that doesn’t include the 10 vocalists or the dozen shofar/anafir players.

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