Jordi Savall

Conductor, gambist, and music researcher Jordi Savall is appearing at the 2016 Easter Festival as artist-in-residence in three events: a world music-inspired “Dialogue of Souls,” a solo recital, and a concert of Baroque choral music. Born in 1941 in Igualada (Catalonia), he initially studied cello in Barcelona before training on the viola da gamba with August Wenzinger at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Together with his late wife, Montserrat Figueras, who died in 2011, he founded the Ensemble Hespèrion XX (today known as Hespèrion XXI) in 1974, which is above all devoted to the early music of Spain and the Mediterranean. He founded the vocal ensemble La Capella Reial de Catalunya in 1987 and, in 1989, its orchestral counterpart, Le Concert des Nations. Jordi Savall is responsible for numerous rediscoveries, from Sephardic romances to operas by Vicente Martín y Soler – unjustly neglected musical treasures that he has presented anew to an audience of millions. Some 140 performances each year take him around the globe. Savall is also known to a still wider public through the film Tous les matins du monde, about the life of the gambist Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe; for the soundtrack he won the César Award. To date Jordi Savall has released more than 230 recordings; these have garnered such awards as the Grammy Award, the Cannes Classical Award, and the International Classical Music Award; since 1998 his CDs have appeared on his own label, Alia Vox, mostly accompanied by lavishly illustrated small books. Jordi Savall has earned numerous honorary doctorates, is a European Union Ambassador for intercultural dialogue, and has been named a UNESCO “Artist for Peace.” He won the Handel Music Prize from the city of Halle in 2009, the International Peace Music Award in 2010, and the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 2012.

Debut bei LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) am 2. September 1992 mit dem Ensemble Hespèrion XX und spanischer Musik des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts.

February 2016