At the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Catalan conductor delivers a particularly lively version of Mozart’s “Requiem”. Not to be missed, this Sunday June 4 at 6:40 p.m. on Arte.
< It was when I heard a rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem that I was certain that I wanted to become a musician. This music invaded me with such emotional force that I said to myself : “If music can have this power over people, I must make it my job.”It is in these terms that the Catalan chef and gambistJordi Savall told us, fifteen years ago, of the birth of his vocation.
To say that Mozart’s last, unfinished opus, which obsessed the genius of Salzburg even on his deathbed, has a special meaning for him would be an understatement.
Viola da gamba
To understand the attachment of the specialist in early music to this theatrical and sacred choral fresco, it must be remembered that, before the viola da gamba and The Human Voices, by Marin Marais, there were those of the liturgical choirs of his native Spain. This is where Jordi Savall was born into music, from the age of 6. This is how, from this early childhood crossed by the Franco dictatorship, his intimate dialogue with music was born. “A dialogue of sensations that ped through the body“, he continues.
Dialogue abruptly interrupted by the moult, which the adolescent Savall experienced as a trauma. Forcing his vocal cords to the point of damaging them. It was in this painful context that the famous encounter of the 14-year-old young man with Mozart’s Requiem took place, which would decide the rest of his life. Searching in the cello, the viola da gamba, then the direction, the extension of this lost voice.
deep humanity
Nearly seven decades later, here he is once again facing the Mozartian masterpiece. It’s certainly not his first time. He recorded it in 1991. At the time, his wife, Montserrat Figueras, held the soprano part. He returned there last year, once again recording the score (CD released by Alia Vox), in the middle of a tour that took him to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where the Arte cameras filmed this concert. .
Helped by the precision and the dramatic force of the choir of the Capella nacional de Catalunya, the sense of detail of the Concert des Nations (delightfully colored br instruments, telluric strings offering the best of interpretation on period instruments), he delivers a totally new and yet perfectly universal vision, dominated by a profound humanity.