Jerusalem
Andrew Clements
The Guardian,
Monday 17 May 2010
Theatre Royal, Norwich
Jordi Savall and his troupe of performers make a speciality of
thematically linked concerts and CD sets that bring together works
from diverse cultures and group them around a meaty historical
concept. Savall has devised a number of these evening-long sequences,
and for the only British appearance on their current European tour
at the Norfolk and Norwich festival, he chose his musical portrait
of Jerusalem – a potted history of the city in seven parts, from Old
Testament times until the end of the Ottoman empire in 1917, ending
with a multilingual plea for reconciliation and peace.
The whole thing is an expertly engineered package, involving more than
40 musicians. Singers and players from Israel, Palestine, Armenia,
Greece and Iraq reinforce Savall’s ensemble Hespèrion XXI and the
voices of La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and the range of instruments
is vast. The soprano Montserrat Figueras doubles on zither, while the
other main singer, Begoña Olavide, also plays the psaltery. There
are medieval harps, a hurdy-gurdy, a pair of ouds and an array of
even less familiar plucked and thrummed instruments, together with a
whole squadron of shofars and anfirs, trumpets made of ram’s horn and
brass, which launches the whole performance with a fanfare composed
by Savall himself.
These sounds are certainly seductively exotic, and the expertise of
the performances impressive, but the true significance of the result
is more doubtful. Many of the items included, whether psalms, crusader
songs, hymns to the virgin, papal pronouncements or extracts from the
Qur’an, are not specific to Jerusalem, and one could probably concoct a
similar history of Damascus or even Constantinople incorporating much
of the same material. It’s dangerously close to a rather superficial
kind of musical tourism.