Jordi Savall, though he specializes in old music, is never content with the tried and true. He came to public attention some three decades ago as a performer of viol music who could actually make the scores sound human again, not like dry museum relics. Whether as a solo player or as a guiding force (usually with his wife, vocalist Montserrat Figueras) of such ensembles as Hesperion XX (now XXI), La Capella Reial, and Le Concert des Nations, he performs with energy and expressive warmth.

Born in Barcelona, Spain, the 68-year-old Savall began his musical training there in a boys’ choir and then studied cello at the Barcelona Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1964. The following year he began teaching himself the viola da gamba and studying early music, eventually pursuing these interests formally at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, where he continues to teach courses and give master classes.

Savall’s repertoire runs the gamut from solo viol music of the 18th-century French composer Marin Marais to big works like Monteverdi’s Vespers. And that’s just his Western European repertory. Increasingly through the years, Savall has drawn on the music and musicians of other cultures, finding many surprising and engaging parallels and points of departure. One of his most lavish and spectacular recent projects along these lines is the majestic Jerusalem: City of Two Peaces—Heavenly Peace and Earthly Peace, a set of two SACDs and a companion book documenting the music of that most multicultural of Mediterranean cities over the course of millennia. The discs are slipped into the endpapers of a thick, lavishly illustrated and annotated book of commentary in multiple languages, including Savall’s own, Catalan.

Savall will perform Jerusalem in concert during a stateside tour in early 2010.

His latest project, La Tragedie Cathare, is scheduled for release this month. It focuses on the Cathare victims of the Crusades. The epic two-CD and book set contains the recording premiere of the “Song of the Albigensian Crusade” taken from the only surviving manuscript dating from the 1200s.

Savall manages such often extravagant packages because he operates his own CD label, Alia Vox (distributed in the United States by Harmonia Mundi). The company issues about one release each month, alternating new productions with reissues of the 150 or so CDs Savall has recorded over the years for other labels.

The new box set is the fifth recording Savall has released in the past year.

The other CDs range from a collection of music by Henry Purcell to an anthology of songs of the Spanish royal minstrels to a set of Irish and Scottish airs and dances.

Meanwhile, Savall and his various ensembles give about 140 concerts a year. Savall is so highly regarded that he and Hesperion XXI were featured last February during the reopening of the revamped Alice Tully Hall in New York City. The sort of high-profile occasion that a few decades ago would have called for a classical violinist like Jascha Heifetz to play 19th-century standards instead allowed Savall to present Sephardic music—primarily that of the Jews of Spain and North Africa—played on such exotic and non-Western instruments as the lira, rebab, dulcimer, oud, santur, and moresca.

During his visit to the United States, Savall spoke about his love of the viol, Baroque music, and communication across cultures.

Strings: You first became well known through your recordings of French viol music, very intimate, personal works. Today, you’re involved in a lot of large-scale projects involving many collaborators. Have your ambitions grown over the past three decades, or did you hope to be able to undertake projects like Jerusalem and La Tragedie Cathare from the beginning?

Savall: Now we have the capacity to realize these things, but some years ago it was impossible because we didn’t have the experience, or the direction. The scale of our work is developing with the experience.

You have a great interest in exploring music from beyond continental Europe, reflected in your Celtic Viol CD, and Orient-Occident and its sequel, Istanbul 1710. Could you discuss that interest?

We Catalans are of the Spanish culture, and we have a very ancient relation with Arab-Andalusian culture and Jewish culture, which was for 700 years a part of our culture. Maybe it’s this historical relationship and human relationship we have behind us that gives us a certain sensitivity and stimulation and curiosity, to reflection about all this.

The fact is, 33 years ago when we started the first Hesperion XX with Montserrat Figueras, from the beginning we produced recordings and concerts of Christian and Jewish music in Spain. We produced together music from the court and the church, which was the classical music from that moment in history. We have also made a big space in our work for the old tradition of Sephardic music, which was not conserved in manuscript but just by oral tradition. This experience was very close to our experience as Catalans; the Catalan culture has a very important oral tradition in music. Catalonia is a very old civilization, with an oral tradition starting with the troubadours, and that is how we have conserved a lot of ancient melodies from Medieval times and the Renaissance. For us, this is the music behind the classical music of the period.

For years we with our classical educations have been too focused on written music. But very early, my colleagues and I discovered the real importance of the non-written music, and what we do in our concerts and recordings now is a continuation of this experience.

It seems that you’re always trying to move just beyond the usual boundaries of classical music. When you started out, for instance, very few people aside from music historians had any knowledge of Marin Marais, but you managed to change that. And the viol itself was quite obscure to the mainstream classical-music public. Were you drawn to the gamba in your youth because you’d already developed an interest in neglected elements of human culture, or was it your love of the gamba that broadened your other interests?

It wasn’t a certain instrument that interested me at the beginning—it was music itself. When I was a child, one day I went to the conservatory to hear a rehearsal of the Mozart Requiem. For two hours I listened to this rehearsal, and it gave me a strong impression of the power of music to touch you. I decided that if music can do this, I would be a musician. I was interested in harmony and counterpoint and music history, but I found the cello to be the most interesting instrument, so I decided to start cello. When I started to practice the cello, I was already looking for different repertories. I found, by casually looking in certain bookshops and music shops, music by Marin Marais, and I started to be fascinated. This was a fascination to discover music that I was not able to hear from other players or recordings. I needed to have the score, to have an experience virgin from other interpretations. This started my evolution as a musician to want to play something I have never heard before—how can you make music with these notes, with this manuscript, without the example of other musicians to guide you?

What is it that you love about your instrument and its music?

The stringed instrument has the capacity to express, with its beauty of sound and beauty of articulation, all the emotions that you can express in music. The voice, of course, is the king of all instruments, but sometimes when you don’t have words you reach something more universal, and instrumental music has this capacity to express what you cannot express with words; the instrument prolongs the signification, gives you an extension of it.

You have your own record label, and between new releases and reissues of older recordings that you did for other companies, you’re averaging one release per month, and they’re all in SACD format. Could you talk about some of the more notable releases you have coming up?

My new project, The Celtic Viol [released earlier this year], is very special because it’s the result of many years of work with Irish and Scottish music. I’m in love with this music; it’s very fascinating. After two or three years of research on the principal collections, I have made a very nice selection of music which represents this idea of “Celtic viol,” which is something perhaps unusual for me but at the same time very natural because of my experience with many kinds of music, especially English music.

I discovered manuscripts with special tunings very close to Celtic traditions, so I use these special tunings to play the Celtic repertoire. I have been working very hard because, of course, this is something that most performers of this music learned from their first years of life, and it’s very difficult for somebody who comes from another tradition to learn this after some years. I have used all my experience in Renaissance and Baroque music, and I have also been learning from a lot of very interesting recordings from the 1920s and 1930s by musicians like J. Scott Skinner and Joe MacLean. Already in the ’30s they had a very strong projection and played in a very romantic way because they were playing with pianoforte. Most recordings you find today with this type of music have a very outgoing, public, folk dimension.

My project is to return to the early sources, so I play it a little differently because of that and because I don’t play with piano; half the recording is alone, and the other half is with harp accompaniment. The project is an homage to this incredible tradition, one of the most interesting traditions in the Occidental repertoire.

For the compact discs on your own label, Alia Vox, your production standards are very high; not only are the recordings of audiophile quality, but the packaging is also better than one generally sees elsewhere, and a few of your projects, most recently Jerusalem, incorporate the CDs into thick, lavishly illustrated books. A cynic might ask why you devote so much care to material that, according to the people who run the major record labels, is of very limited interest to the general public.

Our experience has demonstrated the contrary. Our edition of Jerusalem has been selling quickly. We sold 20,000 records and books in a very short time, just two months, which is something we never expected, because it’s an expensive project and it’s not cheap to buy this book [the book-and-CD set lists for $67.98]. Today it’s very easy to have music from the Internet, and many young people are doing this only. But I think at the same time we need to find different ways to approach the music.

We have seen a lot of interest in the historical projects we do. And Alia Vox is a cultural project, not a commercial project. It is very important that we maintain this cultural mission. Jerusalem is much more than a selection of nice songs and music; it is a reflection of the most difficult problems of our time. We must all reflect on these problems, and music is an element that helps people to understand this.

One last question: What has it meant to you to be a European Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogue, and this year a UNESCO Artist for Peace?

It’s nothing more than we have been doing this last 20 years: to use our professional lives to bring attention to this capacity we have as musicians to understand people from different cultures. As a musician, every time you do music from other cultures, and every time you invite other musicians to play with you, it means you have a certain sympathy for this music, you respect the musicians. You have to give them a possibility to have a dialogue with you, and you have to learn to listen in order to bring the project together. This is essential for any kind of dialogue.

In our projects today, we involve music from different cultures because we have so much to learn from these other cultures. One of the big projects we are doing this year is built around the Ottoman time in Istanbul around the end of the 17th century; we play Turkish music from this period and music from Sephardic communities elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and other music, a dialogue from three different places to express beauty in music.

Our other big project this year is dedicated to the Cathar tragedy, the crusade against the Cathars [a dualist Christian sect in France] 800 years ago. This is a very special, forgotten moment in history. We have to do something to remember what happened at this time, and with music we can help people understand our history.

What Jordi Savall Plays

Early-music specialist Jordi Savall uses several instruments and bows for concerts and recording, including a six-string treble viol, Italian, Anon., circa 1500; a six-string bass viol by Pellegrino Zanetti, Venice, 1550; a seven-string bass viol by Barak Norman, London, 1697; a six-string altus viol by Andreas Doerffel, Klingenthal, 1757; and a five-string pardessus de viol by Nicolas Chapuis, Paris, circa 1760. He uses various period bows by anonymous makers, and Pirastro gut strings, occasionally including harp strings for treble and pardessus viols. —J.R.