Jordi Savall is painting Monteverdi in the colours of the Mediterranean. The Catalan maestro has entrusted the title role of this foundational work of Western music to a remarkable baritone: the magnificent Marc Mauillon embodies Orfeo, his resonant and ductile voice in perfect unison with the conductor’s musical vision. Here, a warm performance and rich sound reign supreme!

“…this live 2006 performance… is given in its original orchestral form in the location for which it was intended - the chapel of Santa Cueva in Cádiz… Played on period instruments the performance… expertly motivated by Jordi Savall, achieving a fine blend of solemnity and austerity with intimacy of feeling. …this is the ultimate in authentic performance.” (BBC Music Magazine)

Following the huge success of the Symphonies boxsets, and considering Jordi Savall's expertise in sacred music it was invevitable that he should record the Missa Solemnis. As in his previous Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn recordings, the Catalan maestro delivers a recording freed from the weight of past traditions to underline the dynamics, the section balance and the timbres that are required in this repertoire. He ignites the Promethean fire as imagined by Beethoven's demiurgic mind.

The technology at our command, the electronic images we see every day, the ease and swiftness of world travel and communication has left modern humans with a waning sense of awe. We can argue about who was or is better off, but for 17th century Europeans, awe-inspiring events happened with some regularity. Pageantry was one of the more effective and popular means to impress a congregation, and there was nothing like a huge celebration in a massive cathedral to remind each person of his place in the grand scheme.

After Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, Jordi Savall continues his journey into the 19th century with the Italian Symphony of Felix Mendelssohn, a composer he records for the first time. He delivers 2 versions of the work: the one which was performed at the wolrdwide premiere in 1833 and the revised one from 1834. The most conspicuous changes are to be found in the last tree movements. The comparison of the two scores and the performance on period instruments take us as close to Mendelssohn's work and original intention as we will ever get. Thanks to Jordi Savall's insightful conducting, there is still something to discover in Mendelssohn's most famous symphony.

After the critical success of the first volume of Beethoven's symphonies, Jordi Savall offers us Symphonies Six to Nine. This latest publication crowns a nearly two-year world tour and confirms the extent to which the Savall renews our vision of these most famous works. The Concert des Nations shows that it also knows how to magnify the repertoire of the early 19th century.

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.

Jordi Savall is painting Monteverdi in the colours of the Mediterranean. The Catalan maestro has entrusted the title role of this foundational work of Western music to a remarkable baritone: the magnificent Marc Mauillon embodies Orfeo, his resonant and ductile voice in perfect unison with the conductor's musical vision. Here, a warm performance and rich sound reign supreme!

Jordi Savall's exemplary performance of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks is among the finest available on disc: refined and precise, but very big, with blood-stirring grandeur. This is just the kind of extroverted, rousing presentation that best highlights the music's open-air ceremonial function. Savall's Le Concert des Nations is essentially a chamber orchestra with double or triple winds, but the sound he elicits from the group is majestic and surprisingly powerful. The playing is crisp and the rhythmic articulation bracing, but the sound is never brash. In fact, more often than not it is seductively sensual, a heady integration of precision and supple, shapely phrasing. Handel left no authoritative edition of the score of Water Music and it has traditionally been divided into three suites, but Savall reorders the material into two suites, a decision that makes more sense in terms of key relationships and that sounds entirely satisfying.

The course of my whole life would undoubtedly have been very different if, one October evening in 1955, I had not had been fortunate enough to hear a live rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem. A few months earlier, on 1st August, I had turned 14, and luck would have it that my teacher, Joan Just (a composer, and the director of the Conservatoire in my home town of Igualada), decided to prepare the work with the choir of the local Schola Cantorum. That evening I was on my way to the Conservatoire to attend my usual counterpoint and harmony lessons with him; for some reason, I didn’t receive the message telling me that classes had been cancelled due to a rehearsal of the Requiem.

Jordi Savall is strongly devoted, perhaps more so than any other conductor, to Franz Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross in its orchestral version, the original incarnation of this masterwork; the familiar string quartet and less familiar solo keyboard and oratorio versions came later. Savall, as is his wont, strongly responds to any music with a historic connection to his native Spain; the commission for the Seven Last Words arrived from José Sáenz de Santmaría of the confraternity of the Hermandad, and it was first performed in Cádiz, the oldest continuously inhabited city in Western Europe.

As early as 1761, a year before his masterpiece Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck largely renewed another musical genre, the ballet, with his adaptation of a work by Molière for Viennese audiences: Don Juan. Another work, Sémiramis, followed a year later. These two works are innovative in that they offer, for the first time, a coherent narrative in which all the resources of the orchestra are put at the service of expressiveness. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations bring out all the nuances of these scores, reminding us that a quarter of a century before Mozart, the stages of Europe were treated to all the evocative power of music by another outstanding figure: Christoph Willibald Gluck.

For this set of Beethoven's first five symphonies, Jordi Savall began with the fundamental idea of recovering the original sound of the orchestra and tempo as the composer imagined them. All the orchestral work was performed with instruments corresponding to those used at the time, and by 55-60 musicians, a number similar to that arranged by the composer. 35 players were selected from Le Concert des Nations alongside 20 young musicians from different countries across world. The main goal was to reflect, in our 21st century, all the richness and beauty of these symphonies, through a true balance between colors and the quality of the orchestra's natural sound.

Farnace was apparently one of Vivaldi's favorite operas because he mounted numerous productions in various cities and wrote six versions of the score, more than of any of his other operas. The conventions of operatic vocal characterizations that came to be standard higher voices in the sympathetic roles and lower voices in villainous roles had not yet been established, and Farnace features a baritone and contralto in the heroic roles, with a soprano as the villain.