Jordi Savall wins the prestigious Siemens prize

BarcelonaJordi Savall (Igualada, 1941) won this Thursday the Ernest von Siemens prizeOne of the most prestigious awards in the world of music, the Siemens Prize, awarded by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts since 1974, comes with a €250,000 prize. Previous recipients include such luminaries as Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, Leonardo Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Andrés Segovia, Daniel Barenboim, and Simon. The award ceremony will take place on May 23 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich. Savall, the first Catalan to win the Siemens Prize, has already achieved international acclaim, including the Léonie Sonning Prize in 2012. This new award further underscores the importance of a master of historical performance, or as he himself puts it, 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 focused on composers such as 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 and care for the world's musical heritage.

As the Siemens Prize jury 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, returning them for everyone to enjoy. A tireless researcher of early music, he performs the repertoire both as a gambist and as a conductor. His activities as a concert performer, teacher, researcher, and creator of new musical projects in historical music," the jury said.

"A European humanist," according to 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 founded the group Hespèrion XX there 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 in the bands I was invited to join," he told 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 Concerts 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 MontserratBach's Passions, 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.