Jordi Savall brought his Hesperion XXI back to Seattle Friday night together with Tembembe Ensamble Continuo, and the two groups amalgamated to play Baroque music from Spain and South America.
Under the auspices of the Early Music Guild, the performance at Town Hall drew a packed house of not only early music devotees but many with a Hispanic background, helpful to understand the songs and translate the names of the many guitar-like instruments or percussion.
Savall himself took the lead throughout, playing either the bass viola da gamba (his being a superb 1697 seven-string instrument by Barak Norman) or a small Italian treble viol from 1500. Despite being in his 70s, the Catalan Savall’s fingers are as agile as ever, as he played increasingly fast and florid improvisations on dances and folias. As a change of pace, he played a solo of music from the Celtic influence in the New World, in which hornpipe and reel rhythms were clearly present despite the Hispanic environment.
The group of seven musicians included, besides Savall, three other members of Hesperion: Xavier Diaz-Latorre playing guitar and Andrew Lawrence-King on a big harp with percussionist David Mayoral on a drum which he played with sticks on both head and rim, maracas with which he seemed miraculously inventive, wood block and tambourine; and the Tembembe players: Ulises Martinez on violin and guitar, Enrique Barone on a variety of guitars and a horse’s jawbone (yes indeed: it sounded like a rattly block), and Leopoldo Novoa on guitars and marimbol. This last was a large oblong wood box on which he sat, with on the front a group of tuned metal strips over a sound hole. All of them sang lustily as well. Although between the seven there were four music stands, no one ever seemed to turn a page, all heads were turned to Savall and they all played the complex rhythms and improvisations as though by instinct.
Lively dances and songs, fandango, canarios and songs such as the jacaras “La Petenera,” punctuated the program. One jacaras, the only work in which Savall did not appear, was introduced by Lawrence-King who described it as a duet for a man and a woman who are engaging in a face-to-face, advancing and retreating aggressively. ”It’s nothing less than lovemaking from beginning to end,” he said.
It would have added to performance enjoyment had other works had similar introductions. There were no program notes, several pieces went straight from one to the next, and the program order was not strictly adhered to anyway. Not that this was particularly important as the lights were dimmed and the program not readable during the performance.
Nevertheless, the whole absorbing evening received vociferous applause and the encore of a song from Peru.
