NEW YORK — Wherever Jordi Savall wishes to travel, an audience will follow. This early-music master’s fervent community of admirers is the result of both the consistently gorgeous playing of Hespèrion XXI — the ensemble he conducts and plays in — and Savall’s ceaseless pursuit of unfamiliar repertoire, often presented as evening-length events that draw inspiration from diverse cultures.
He has used this programming ingenuity to conceive of an original portrait of Joan of Arc. Or, on the album “The Routes of Slavery” (a project assisted by UNESCO), he crafted a memorial to communities targeted by historical plunder. Behind all this conceptual work is a belief in music’s healing power for contemporary audiences.
Such well-intended programs are a natural fit with Lincoln Center’s spiritually minded White Light Festival, which presented Savall’s “Francis Xavier’s Journey to the East” to a nearly full Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night. By tracing a 16th-century missionary’s travels, and by sketching the larger context of the times in which he lived, Savall shared his interest in musical traditions from Europe, Africa and Asia.
The evening’s first half was a master-class display of everything that makes Savall and his retinue of players so indispensable. (On Thursday, he joined on the treble viol.) The glorious ensemble sound of Hespèrion XXI featured period-instrument textures rendered with a delicacy and clarity sufficient to make a listener truly feel like a time traveler, exploring the Renaissance without any hint of distance.
Savall’s eclecticism also rose to the surface — most powerfully in a suite of guest appearances by Prabhu Edouard on tablas (Indian drums) and Daud Khan Sadozai on the sarod (a South Asian string instrument). Taking a handoff from Hespèrion XXI and the vocalists of La Capella Reial de Catalunya, the pair produced a stirring (and perhaps too brief) raga version of the hymn “O gloriosa Domina.”
Edouard and Hespèrion’s David Mayoral formed a different duo with a sumptuous blend of percussion patterns and textures. This, in turn, led to a performance by the combined ensembles — with the sarod’s metallic twang offering a captivating contrast to the timbres of Hespèrion’s harp and viols — that drew ecstatic applause.
There was less of a sense of spontaneous delight in the concert’s second half, inspired by St. Xavier’s travels to Japan and China. The contributions by various guest soloists in these portions were also stellar — though these players were isolated from the Hespèrion musicians for long stretches. Perhaps that was a necessary move in the context of this concert, particularly given the history of Christianity’s legacy in Japan.
But all high-concept heroics aside, leaving Hespèrion XXI players so often silent for the closing hour of their own concert creates some problems with momentum. Yet at this stage of a varied and luminous career, each new risk taken by Savall — and each moment that he and his ensemble are playing — can still feel like a cultural experience worth the journey.
This article originally appeared in
.