Jordi Savall echoed yesterday, as part of his Festival in Santes Creus – and with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons – of two undeniable realities that occur in Europe today in early music. The first is the incomparable talent of young performers who dominate this field, both in technical mastery and in musical temperament, and in this so elusive that it is called baroque air and feeling. And the second is that, in this generation of artists under 40 years of age, which is what this Savall Academy convened – within Yocpa, the Young Orchestra and Choir Professional Academies, led by the International Center for Early Music with the support of the EU–, the women show an energy and a fullness that could not be enjoyed 100 percent on the stages until now. Because they had never been called upon to form an all-female baroque orchestra.
If among the thousands of attendees who packed the baroque Bernat Calvó square to the brim – outside the enclosure that had Pere el Ceremoniós walled up – there was someone who hoped to find a femininity in the approach to Vivaldi’s most iconic piece , he was quickly able to understand that music is music and does not understand cultural stereotypes. And that a woman artist’s way of doing things can be as masculine or as feminine as she wants, which is why they are able to imagine whatever is needed.
The program, fabulously mainstream – if that is possible in a festival like Savall’s -, began with two concerts also by Vivaldi, Il Proteo or sia Il mondo al rovescio, and La tempesta di Mare. Both led by the master with the breath of beauty always above joy and debauchery. But the key moment of the Seasons has arrived … the concertina Alfia Bakieva of Tatar origin, a woman who, moreover, specializes in the music of this popular tradition, has a passion for tango and has shared the stage with Dua Lipa or Massive Attack took the reins with force while Savall left him room to approach a work that, if desired, lifts the flight.
On stage there were about twenty women being filmed by the cameras of the production company Karl More. And among them, the reciter, the actress Laura Aubert, daughter of the historical violinist of Le Concert des Nations Santi Aubert. Here he made short and well-integrated interventions with texts attributed to Vivaldi himself, who, in fact, wrote The Four Seasons to illustrate a series of paintings in which he showed his ospedaline – the virtuosos of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice who they interpreted the works – to inspire them: the wheat harvest in the Summer, that drunkard who comes out in the Autumn…
This year marks three centuries since the premiere of The Four Seasons. And it was a happy coincidence that Savall wanted to have women as the guiding thread of this edition in Santes Creus. This is how he addressed the repression they suffer in eastern countries; also the woman as muse; the allusion, yesterday, to Vivaldi’s virtuosos; the Stabat Mater as music dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the creation of women: from Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann who will be heard today, to the composers of the Italian seicento who performed the much applauded The Ministers of Pastime, a set emerged in Barcelona who have also been chosen by Savall to tour three festivals in southern Europe in an emerging program.
The ovation they received in the Old Dormitory could raise the abbots of the chapter house, where they began to be buried in 1500, from their graves.
