Jordi Savall wins the prestigious Ernst von Siemens prize

BarcelonaJordi Savall (Igualada, 1941) won this Thursday the Ernst von Siemens prizeThe award, one of the most prestigious in the world of music, is presented by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts on behalf of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation for Music since 1974. It comes with a prize of €250,000, and previous recipients include Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, Leonard Bernstein, and Claudio Abbado. The award ceremony will take place on May 23 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich and will include a special concert by Hesperion XXI and the Royal Chapel of Catalonia, conducted by Jordi Savall.

Savall's cultural contribution, the first Catalan to win the Siemens Prize, had already reached international milestones such as the Léonie Sonning Prize in 2012, and this new award further underscores the importance of a master of historical performance, or, as he himself says, of "interpretation." This is how he has approached a vast repertoire, including medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, and how he has undertaken highly ambitious projects related to the composers Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, always with his ensembles: Hespèrion XXI, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and Le Concert des Nations. Furthermore, he has promoted the Fontfreda Festival and the Jordi Savall Festival, and the Alia Vox record label, which for 28 years has maintained a commitment to preserving the world's musical heritage.

As the jury of the Ernst von Siemens Prize notes, Jordi Savall is "one of the most versatile musical personalities of his generation." "For more than fifty years, he has rescued musical gems from oblivion and neglect, and returned them for everyone to enjoy. A tireless researcher of early music, he performs the repertoire as a gambist and as a conductor. His activities as a concert performer, teacher, researcher, and creator of new musical projects in historical music," says the jury.

"A European humanist," according to the description made by essayist Rob Riemen, Savall believes "that art must be useful to society." "Art for art's sake is not useful. When we make music, we contribute to the well-being of the people who listen to this music, and to the harmony of a world in crisis where there are more wars and more refugees than ever," he said when He received the Gold Medal of the Generalitat in 2014Savall's first passion was the cello, until Enric Gispert, director of the Ars Musicae group, convinced him to delve into the viola da gamba, the instrument with which he later, in 1974, won a professorship in Basel. Searching through archives in Europe, in museums and libraries, he discovered the great musical gems of the Baroque, especially the French, although he had already worked, with the cello, on the repertoire of the Spanish Golden Age. 1974 was also an important year because Savall created the group Hespèrion XX with Montserrat Figueras (his wife), Lorenzo Alpert, and Hopkinson Smith. It was a decisive turning point, because from then on he began to be the master of his own destiny in the sense that he could decide what to perform and how. "Before, I was a kind of mercenary who earned a living playing for the bands that invited me," he explained in the magazine. 440Another turning point came in 1987 with the founding of the Royal Chapel of Catalonia, a state institution. And in 1989 he created the orchestra Le Concert des Nations, with which he has carried out many of the most ambitious projects of his career. All the work of these years culminated in 1991 with the soundtrack for the film Every morning in the worldby Alain Corneau. Savall won the César Award for Best Original Score, in which he performed works from the French Baroque period by composers such as Marin Marais, Sainte-Colombe, François Couperin, and Jean-Baptiste Lully. It was the definitive confirmation that placed the maestro among the greats of early music, and with a vast repertoire: the Red Book of Montserrat, the PassionIt's by Bach, the Aquatic music by Handel, Orpheus Monteverdi, Beethoven's complete symphonies, the music of the Sephardic diaspora, Creole dances... In addition, he has created conceptual repertoires on the routes of slavery, peace, the Mediterranean, Ramon Llull... "The most frequently performed preserved traditional music is that of the Jewish people, the slaves, the peoples who have suffered hunger and had to emigrate; also the music of marginalized cultures such as Catalan or Breton, which have an extraordinary emotional and expressive content. Savall explained to ARAIn keeping with this humanist spirit, and in response to the humanitarian crisis stemming from various armed conflicts and situations of oppression, in 2018 he founded Orpheus XXI, an ensemble made up of refugee musicians. In recent years, in addition to maintaining an intense concert schedule, Savall has been working to ensure the continuity of his ensembles. "That they can be preserved with a new conductor when I retire, as happens with European orchestras, and that we can say that we too are European and that we can do things as they do in Vienna or Berlin, with dignity and high standards," he says.