This live recording made on January 31, 2002 at the Liceu Theater in Barcelona is already a cornerstone of any Monteverdi discography. Previously only available on DVD from Opus Arte, this multi-channel SACD version reveals the full scale of Jordi Savall's inspiration. Beautifully executed by La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Le Concert des Nations, and a cast of soloists that includes Furio Zanasi, Sara Mingardo, and the late Montserrat Figueras, this is a release to treasure.

This disc of Iberian and Latin American Renaissance music is a reissue cleverly disguised as a new release. It compiles music from several recordings by Catalonian visionary Jordi Savall, his luminous-voiced collaborator Montserrat Figueras, and his Hesperion XXI and Capella Reial de Catalunya ensembles, dressing them up with a new set of rather philosophical booklet notes on themes of change, of intercultural tolerance, and of the evolving nature of Christianity in the Iberian realm and in New Spain. Some might call this a cynical ploy, but actually Savall has always been moving in a circle, so to speak, spiraling inward toward a deeper musical understanding of the historical themes touched on here: the lingering effects of the legacy of medieval Iberia and its "mestissage" or mixture of cultures, the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles (Carlos) V (did you know that he was both the first monarch to be called "His Majesty" and the first to be honored with the claim that the "sun never set" on his empire?), and the relationships between cultivated and popular styles, both in Iberia and the New World.

Tant au niveau des formes que des couleurs musicales, “L’Orchestre de Louis XIII” marque la transition entre deux grandes époques : la fin de la Renaissance et l’entrée dans le Baroque. Ces musiques de cour aux saveurs populaires, toujours imaginatives et colorées, sont à la recherche constante de souplesse et de grâce, de grandeur et d’élégance. Elles constituent les éléments caractéristiques du style typiquement français qui va rayonner à travers toute l’Europe jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIème siècle.

Jordi Savall's prolific output of recordings on Alia Vox is hard to pigeonhole because his expansive repertoire runs from some of the most obscure early music of the Old and New Worlds, to well-established classics like George Frederick Handel's Messiah. Recorded live at a December, 2017 concert in the Chapelle Royale du Chateau de Versailles, this performance of Messiah is based on the 1741 autograph score in the British Library in London, essentially re-creating the Dublin version, with restored oboe parts taken from the part-books for the 1754 Foundling Hospital version, and with four vocal soloists instead of Handel's original group of nine.

‘Judith triumphant over the barbarians of Holofernes’ is the only survivor of the four oratorios that Vivaldi is known to have composed. The work was commissioned to celebrate the victory of the Republic of Venice over the Turks during the siege of Corfu. All characters, male and female, are interpreted by women (originally the singers of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice). Although the rest of the oratorio survives completely intact, the overture has been lost and Jordi Savall has selected two existing concertos as introduction, of which the key, mode and no doubt date of composition coincide most closely with the subject of the oratorio.

Alcione's first performance took place at the Theatre du Palais Royal in Paris on February 18, 1706. Alongside Semele, it is the only opera composed by Marin Marais. Shortly after the premiere, Marais gathered together the most beautiful tunes, including the famous Tempest, and composed four instrumental suites. Le Concert des Nations and Jordi Savall revel in the rich colors of these vivid scores. Originally released on the Astree label, Alia Vox has reissued this superb recording as part of its Heritage series. In addition to deluxe packaging and a richly documented booklet, the release has been remastered and now features state-of-the-art multichannel audio.

Jordi Savall is among the leading instrumentalists and conductors of the European early music scene, specializing in Renaissance, Baroque, and Medieval music. He took an interest in early music, and began learning the viola da gamba. He studied the gamba and early music research and practice with Wieland Kuijken in Brussels and August Wenzinger at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel. In 1968, Savall married the soprano Montserrat Figueras, who shared his interest in early music. With Figueras and other musicians interested in early Spanish music, he founded the ensemble Hespèrion XX in 1974. The ensemble took its name from an ancient name for the Western European region from Italy to Iberia. At the turn of the 21st century, the group changed its name to Hespèrion XXI.

Biber's grand Requiem in A Major was probably written for the funeral of his employer, Archbishop Maximilian of Salzburg. It is a celebratory piece, with trumpets (and timpani added by Savall) and rich orchestration, quite suitable for a heavenbound soul. The quieter moments ("Sanctus") are just as effective as the big ones ("Dies irae"). The CD's opener, a 13-minute "Battalia" for instruments only, is amazingly colorful and contains some weird, entertaining dissonances. The performances by La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations are ideal. Biber seems to be coming into his own lately, and the recent CDs devoted to his work are very exciting. He was apparently a virtuoso who enjoyed making big statements; they deserve to be heard. Lovers of "high Baroque" music will be moved and delighted.

–Robert Levine

There is a certain attraction to music of the viola da gamba, but usually, a few tunes are enough. Not that the gamba is not a beautiful instrument: round and rich-toned, supremely sensitive to the touch, and sublimely evocative of the human voice, the gamba is arguably one of the most soulful instruments ever devised. But the repertoire for the gamba makes extended listening emotionally fatiguing. The French music veers from the sentimental to the suicidal, the German repertoire ranges from the dour to the dismal, and the English repertoire is so fatalistic as to hardly exist in this world. Thus, getting through a whole disc of the gamba is like playing Russian roulette: the more you play, the more likely it is that you'll come to grief. But not on this disc by Jordi Savall.

Like many of his contemporaries, Marin Marais has paid the price of his proximity to some outstandingly brilliant musicians. Between Lully and Rameau we can still cite Charpentier, Delalande, Campra and François Couperin. But what about the others? The Destouches, Mouret and Marais pale beside the stars of a fertile era which was rocked by controversy. The school of harpsichordists and organists, who were no match for Lully’s vocal art, are still represented in the repertoire of present-day performers: D’Anglebert, Lebègue, Dandrieu, Grigny and Clérambault are still played on our instruments. But Marin Marais had the misfortune not only to compose operas in Lully’s domain, but also to devote the bulk of his art to an instrument which was being eclipsed by the advance of the violin family… namely, the VIOLA DA GAMBA or the BASS VIOL. And it is only recently that we have rediscovered the specific manner of playing this instrument as well as the composers who wrote for it.

Lully, Handel, Charpentier, Scheidt, Biber, Schein, Cabanilles, Dumanoir, Rosenmüller, Jenkins, Cererols, Blow: this double SACD-book gathers the who’s-who of European music, to mention but a few, of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. Deeply affected by the Thirty Years War as well as the War of Spanish Succession, the finest music inspired by this turmoil is vividly performed by Jordi Savall and his ensembles. The set ends with a fantastic and complete performance of Handel’s 'Jubilate Deo'.

The existence of a third Passion by Bach based on the Gospel of St. Mark had long been known. Numerous studies carried out from the second half of the 20th century by specialist musicologists and musicians confirmed that on Good Friday, 1731, Bach presented this Passion set to a text by Picander, which the latter published one year later at the same time as his third volume of poetry. In 2009, the existence of this Passion was fully confirmed by the discovery at St. Petersburg of a later version of the libretto used for a new performance of the work, which took place in 1744. Compared with the 1732 libretto, it contains a number of modifications to the texts, as well as a different ordering of some chorales and arias and the addition of two new arias. Thanks to the new version, we have a very clear idea of the form and content of this third Passion by Bach.

Baroque instrumental music often took the form of dance suites, which allowed considerable flexibility in the arrangement of minuets, sarabandes, gavottes, bourrées, chaconnes, allemandes, and courantes, mixed with character pieces and even scenic tableaux in the much larger presentations of court ballets. In Terpsichore: Apothéose de la Danse baroque, a splendid 2018 AliaVox release by Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations, works by Jean-Féry Rebel and Georg Philipp Telemann are compared side-by-side to indicate the commonality of practices at the time, as well as the variety of dance music in the hands of two different masters.

Couperin’s four dance suites of Les nations were published in 1726. Each is prefaced with an Italianate trio sonata whose music, for three of them, derives from sonatas which Couperin wrote during the 1690s. The fourth, introducing ‘L’impériale’, is a more fluently mature piece which he probably composed much later on. If the introductory ‘Sonades’, as Couperin called them, are Italian in their idiom, then the appended dances are characteristically and unmistakeably French. Jordi Savall brings the music to life with mediterranean warmth and an intuitive feeling for dance rhythms and their individual gestures.

In his very favorable review of the Musical Offering, colleague Dan Davis noted how Savall's unique arrangement of the movements augments the performance's overall impact by forming a structurally sound symmetrical "arch" from beginning to end. Here Savall similarly rethinks the structural possibilities of the work, though his organizational choices function primarily as a means to enrich the impression of the fugues' varied sonorities and contrapuntal textures. Tempos also are generally very reserved, reminiscent of Davis' description of those in the Musical Offering as "startling in their slowness".