“A cry for life” through music has been the seminal idea of this year’s Festival Jordi Savall held in Montblanc and at the Monasteries of Poblet and Santes Creus during the months of July and August, with a great diversity of programs inspired by the defence of ideas and values such as memory and spirituality, environmentalism and Nature, freedom and feminine values, paying special tribute to the heroic women of Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Palestine, countries where women are the victims of harsh repression.
In this third festival we have continued our commitment to the recovery of the Catalan and European musical heritage, based on a clear solidarity with refugee musicians, the younger generation of musicians and the people of Ukraine. Festival-goers have enjoyed an eclectic program consisting of 14 concerts and a cycle of 3 conferences addressing a rich range of proposed topics and music from the 12th to the 19th centuries, including contemporary music and Oriental traditions.
Thanks to the incomparable setting of the historic venues of Montblanc, Poblet and Santes Creus, as well as the excellence and musical quality of the programming reached with the symbiosis between both young and well-established artists, including national and International musicians, and a team which has succeeded in integrating people of Santes Creus as voluntaries and local companies, we are pleased to be able to celebrate the success of this third Festival, which has brought together an audience of more than 5,000 persons who are lovers of beauty and music from across the surrounding area, Catalonia, Europe and the world.
Among the different extraordinary moments of the festival, we would like to highlight: the inaugural concert at Santes Creus, Tribute to the heroic women of Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Syria; the third concert on Sunday 13th August, which was attended by more than a thousand people to listen to The Four Seasons and other concertos by Vivaldi performed by the orchestra Le Concert des Nations Féminin created and directed by Jordi Savall to homage the female musicians who formed part of the orchestra of the Ospedale della Pietà in 18th century Venice, and also the closing concert on 15th August featuring La Capella Nacional de Catalunya and the pianist Olga Pashchenko, who performed Fanny Mendelssohn’s Songs of Nature conducted by Lluís Vilamajó and Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream conducted by Jordi Savall with the magnificent participation of the actors Sílvia Bel and Jordi Boixaderas and another five young actors under the stage direction of Pau Carrió.
During the five days of the festival, a total of 150 musicians have participated from around 20 countries including Israel, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Cuba, Ukraine and Iran, performing music from a wide range of historical periods and cultures, from Monteverdi to Arvo Pärt and from the Middle East to America.
Now established as one of the main music festivals in Catalonia in its genre, the Jordi Savall Festival is committed to transversality in its programming, which, in addition to the concerts, has offered guided and themed tours of the Royal Monastery of Santes Creus and conferences on the social, artistic and historical reality of women. With the aim of facilitating travel to the venues, thus allowing the music to reach a wider audience, between 11th and 15th August a daily bus service has been provided from Reus, Barcelona and Tarragona. It is planned to increase this service for future editions of the Festival.
This year festival has strengthened its links with the surrounding area by inviting local producers and suppliers who have formed part of the “Gastronomic Space”, thereby expanding on the musical offer to include the produce and products of top-quality local businesses to raise the profile of the wines and gastronomy of the Alt Camp and Conca de Barberà.
In the words of the Jordi Savall Festival coordinator, Martí Sancliment, “the festival has established itself as a proposal of excellence and a reference that year after year will strengthen its ties with the territory and its people and its commitment to the ethical principles that inspire Jordi Savall’s work, such as humanism and intercultural dialogue.”
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