Jordi Savall: From East to West
Friday 28 June | 21:00
Jordi Savall (viola da gamba)
Hakan Gügör (kanun)
Dimitri Psonis (santur, lute, guitare moresc, percussion)
Pre-concert talk at 8 pm.
A Dialogue of Souls
Listening to this music of the East and the West, ingeniously collected by Jordi Savall, is an experience out of the ordinary: an intense feeling is added to the aesthetic emotion, that of communicating, by magic, with a reconciled humanity.
In the second half of the 15th century, at the time of the simultaneous death of Sepharad and al-Andalus, forty years after the collapse of Byzantium, between the East and the West, mental and spiritual walkways were destroyed and have never been repaired again. The Mediterranean has ceased to be that fertile sea located at the center of our cultural universe, to be nothing more than a battlefield and a barrier.
Today, our common sea is the place where an invisible wall stands that divides the planet between the frightened North and the desperate South; and between communities that have got into the habit of distrusting the “other” and keeping away from them. The Arab world and the Jewish world seem to have forgotten their once fruitful kinship; the Muslim East and the West of Christian tradition seem locked in a dead-end confrontation.
To give back to our disoriented humanity some signs of hope, we need to go well beyond a dialogue of cultures and beliefs, towards a dialogue of souls. This is, at the beginning of the 21st century, the irreplaceable mission of art. And this is precisely what we feel when listening to this splendid music from different eras and lands. Suddenly we discover, or rediscover, that civilizations that seemed distant from each other, and even enemies, are extraordinarily close, extraordinarily complicit.
During this journey through time and space, we ask ourselves at every moment whether the conflicts to which we are accustomed are not deceptive, in the end, and whether the truth of men and cultures does not rather lie in this dialogue of instruments, of chords, cadences, gestures and breaths. A feeling of profound joy then arises in us, the fruit of an act of faith: diversity is not necessarily a prelude to hostility; our cultures are not separate entities closed inside watertight compartments; our world is not condemned to endless lacerations; it can still be saved… After all, isn’t it the aim of ART since the beginning of the human adventure?
Amin Maalouf
