Jordi Savall echoed yesterday, within the framework of his festival in Santes Creus –and with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons–, of two undeniable realities that occur today in Europe in early music. The first is the incomparable sap of young interpreters who dominate this field, both in technical mastery and in musical talent, and in that so elusive that we call baroque air and feeling. And the second is that, in this generation of artists under 40 years of age, which is what Savall called for in this Academy –within Yocpa, the Young Orchestra and Choir Professional Academies, led by the Center Internacional de Música Antiga with the support of the EU–, women show an energy and a fullness of which never before had been able to show one hundred percent on stage. Because they had never been summoned to form a baroque orchestra entirely of women.
If among the thousand attendees who filled the baroque Bernat Calvó square to the brim – outside the enclosure that Pere el Cerimoniós had walled up – there was someone who hoped to find a femininity in the way of approaching Vivaldi's most iconic piece, he could quickly observe that music is music and does not understand cultural stereotypes. And that the way a woman artist works can be as masculine or as feminine as she wants, for that she has a sharp imagination.
The fabulously mainstream program – if that is possible at a festival like Savall's – began with three concerts also by Vivaldi: Il Proteo o sia, Il mondo al rovescio, La tempesta di Mare and the one for four violins, conducted by the maestro with the breath of beauty always present and above joy and debauchery. But when the key moment of the Seasons arrived... the concertmaster Alfia Bakieva, of Tatar origin, a woman specialized in the music of this popular tradition but who feels a passion for tango, took the reins tightly while Savall left her space to address a work that takes flight from beginning to end.
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 historic violinist of Le Concert des Nations, Santi Aubert, who here made brief interventions well integrated with texts attributed to Vivaldi himself. Well, in fact, the composer wrote The Four Seasons to illustrate a series of paintings. And he showed them to his ospedaline –the virtuosos of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice who interpreted the works for him– to inspire them: the wheat harvest in Summer, that drunkard who goes out in Autumn...
This year marks three centuries since the premiere of The Four Seasons. And it has been a happy coincidence that Savall wanted to have women as the common thread of this edition in Santes Creus. Thus, he has addressed the repression they suffer in Eastern countries; also the woman as muse; the aforementioned allusion to Vivaldi's virtuous women; the Stabat Mater as music dedicated to the Virgin, and the creation of women: from Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann that will be heard today, to the composers of the Italian 17th century who performed a highly acclaimed The Ministers of Pastime, a group that emerged in Barcelona that also have been chosen by Savall to tour three festivals in southern Europe in an emerging program. The ovation they received in the Old Dormitory could have raised the abbots from the grave in the chapter house, where they began to bury themselves in 1500.
