The World’s Oldest Groupies?

When Sarah and I moved to Lisbon two and a half years back, we never expected to start following a musician to four performances in three different locations with a fifth concert set for this coming December! Especially when that musician specializes in music from the 12th through the early 19th century with works from Middle Eastern to European traditions of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic heritage and performed on “original” instruments from those times. Not exactly topping your Billboard list, yeah? (Don’t bother, they don’t even have a list for classical music!)

But Jordi Savall has captured Sarah’s and my devotion with his lively and insightful, historically informed performances of early music, some of which was once considered lost, with his groups Hespèrion XXI and Les Concert des Nations. It’s clear that he and his fellow musicians relish their music making and share in their love of communicating with each other and their audiences.

So, Sarah and I, as good groupies would, grabbed tickets for not one, but two of Jordi Savall’s concerts that were part of this summer’s annual Jordi Savall Festival, in his beloved Catalunya. We flew from Lisboa to Barcelona and then enjoyed a two hour train ride down the Mediterranean coast through the old Roman town of Tarragona then north into the mountains to the walled medieval town of Montblanc. No, not that Mont Blanc! That Mont Blanc is not in Catalunya but straddles France and Italy and a bit of Switzerland and is covered with snow. This one is a charming, walled, medieval town!

The two concerts in Montblanc included different performers, the first one featuring only Jordi Savall and two other musicians of his group Hespérion XXI in a concert titled “Dialogues of Memory and Spirit.” The three played music from ancient (12th through 14th century) Jewish, Christian, and Islamic heritage and improvised frequently, sharing smiles and welcoming new discoveries.

The second concert included six marvelous singers from La Capella de Catalunya as well as eight instrumentalists from Hespérion XXI in a performance titled “Catalunya Comtat Gran, Temps de Batalles, Cants de Gestão i Planys” or “Catalunya, Grand Country, Times of Battles, Songs of Deeds and Lamentations.” The music spanned from the 17th through the early 18th century and reflected the ongoing wars that ravaged Catalunya and the Iberian peninsula through those years. As the standing ovation at the end of the concert began to subside, a woman in the audience shouted “Viva Catalunya” and the crowd cheered!

These concerts followed our first two experiences seeing Jordi Savall in live performances. In the fall of 2021, his full orchestra, Les Concert Des Nations, played Beethoven’s 6th and 7th symphonies in our marvelous Gulbenkian Auditorium—a fifteen minute stroll from our flat here in Lisboa—where the acoustics are precise and transparent, and Sarah and I were mesmerized! A month later, on our first groupie-worthy trip, we followed Jordi to Toledo, Spain, where he and Xavier Diaz-Latorre , who played the hundred-stringed theorbo, performed improvisations on the La Folia theme for over an hour in a wind-driven drizzle in the outside halls of the cloisters at the Toledo Cathedral. Okay, it’s not really a hundred strings but it’s a whole lot!

At any rate, we loved our time in Catalunya and a few days in Barcelona (for our second visit–the first was when we lived in India and Portugal wasn’t even a gleam in our eyes) where we got to take in several more of the modernista architectural delights. Gaudi’s La Sagrada is always worth a visit but we were absolutely charmed touring two of Domènich i Montaner’s early twentieth century projects, the Palau de la Música Catalan and the multi-building Hospital de Sant Pau which was originally begun a few years earlier, in, wait for it, 1401.

BTW, our friend and neighbor here in Avenidas Novas, Randy Treu, with his background in stage and lighting tech, joined us for a couple days and one of the concerts in Montblanc, and it is his surreptitious photo of us taken at the monastery in nearby Poblet—at our intellectual and artistic best—that serves as the header photo for this post . . . Thanks a lot, pal!

Of course, no journey is complete without a meal or two! Sarah and I enjoyed several return tapas feasts at our favorite Cervesaria Catalana just off Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona where we fell in love on this trip with our very first cava sangria. And we discovered a few more culinary gems so we fueled up nicely for our siestas. Not to mention a return to our very favorite gelato shop in all the world, Gioelia! Okay, several returns.

And speaking of returns, we’re already excited to see Jordi Savall and friends this December and then again next July/August in Montblanc! Viva Catalunya! Of course, that will be another story . . . .