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Jordi Savall

“Encounters of Fire and Air: Music of Old Spain and the New World” was the title of the program Catalan gambist Jordi Savall brought to the Jesuit Urban Center in the South End last Friday, and as anyone who has heard the Alia Vox CD in which it was grounded, Villancicos y Danzas Criollas (what the New Yorker ’s Alex Ross has called “Alia Vox’s unofficial party CD”), could have predicted, it rocked. Savall brought members of his two “Hesperia” (the Greek name given to the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, since they lay to the west) ensembles, La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Hespèrion XXI, and though his wife, soprano Montserrat Figueras, was missed in the one and the brass that gleams through the CD in the other, there was no lack of combustible material.

The line-up was minimal — viols in four sizes (Jordi on the treble and directing), double harp, guitar, psaltery, castanets, percussion, and five singers — and the program simple, five blocks of four numbers that alternated instrumental and vocal, music from the Old World and the New, in Quetcha and Nahuatl as well as Catalan and Castilian. There were a couple of duets — guitarist Xavier Díaz-Latorre with percussionist Pedro Estevan in a set of “Jácaros & Canarios” from Gaspar Sanz, harpist Arianna Savall (Jordi’s daughter) and Estevan in a tarantela by Lucas Ruiz de Ribayaz — and one a cappella number for the quintet, the anonymous “Todo el mundo en general.” Mostly we got the full ensemble, and it was surprising to hear how richly the nine instruments filled the large church — particularly since it was the cello’s superior muscle that enabled it to supersede the gamba. It was surprising how readily Díaz-Latorre’s guitars bridged the divide between popular and classical, how poignantly Arianna Savall recalled the Chieftains’ late harpist, Derek Bell, how engagingly the swaying movements of tenor-gambist Johanna Valencia conjured the gamba-playing angel in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. It was surprising how lusty everyone sounded in vocal music that dealt largely with the Annunciation and the Nativity. It was not surprising that the first half of the evening ended with the first track from Villancicos y Danzas Criollas , the Juan Arañés chacona “A la vida bona” (“Here’s to the Good Life”); when they play this one, life is indeed good.