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Concert-goers who filed into the pews of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, in Kansas City, Friday night, October 24th, for a performance by Jordi Savall and his medieval music group Hespèrion XXI were greeted by a statement illuminated against a black backdrop: The author of the remark is Sancho Panza, squire to Don Quixote, that memorably backward knight-errant in Miguel de Cervantes' landmark novel, Don Quixote. For Savall who explored the music of the era-  16th century Spain - for his adaptation, Don Quijote de la Mancha: Ballades and Music, Sancho's remark, like Cervantes' novel, is full of multiple meanings. The evening's performance had its share of lightness, even a mischievous turn toward the end, but the overall mood was one of melancholy; Don Quixote, however comic by turns, is at heart a deeply serious work about love, justice, death, reality and illusion. Savall's subtle interpretation matched the original in its own original manner.

The performance was the first in this season's Friends of Chamber Music's Early Music Series; in her introduction, Cynthia Siebert, the founder and artistic director, spoke of the novel's reminder to us of the "necessity of imagination." Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (in two parts, published in 1605 and 1615) in response to a literary tradition hundreds of years old, the chivalric romance, which had eroded into stereotypical tales of heroes-on-horseback. Warfare was paramount then, as now; Spain was considered the greatest world power, and its influence was political, cultural, and liturgical. Cervantes interwove familiar stories of maidens mourning and lost lovers found with a new, modern tone represented by the frail self-made knight and his proverb-bearing sidekick, who together questioned the idea of things as they were while demonstrating things as they could be. Jordi Savall's program did not follow the novel per se; it was a musical exploration of the novel's themes, through the music of the time and Savall's own compositions, played by musicians on instruments of the time, such as the oboe-esque shawm and the trombone's predecessor, the sackbut. Flute, kettle drum, guitar, cello, and Savall's own exquisitely handled viola de gamba added to the musical measure, alternating between brisk marches and saturnine songs delicately delivered by La Capella Reial de Catalunya.

To flesh out the alternating instrumental and vocal parts, brief scenes from the novel were dramatized by F. Murray Abraham, out of costume but in a Quixotic goatee. With his own amiable charm and dashes of characterization, the actor illuminated the novel's narrative, emphasizing its madness of reason in a world routinely given over to bloody revenge and book burnings. (At evening's end, Savall spoke briefly, discussing the method of musicians in the 15th and 16th centuries to end pieces on four notes, which he played, before the entire group burst into a chorus of "Happy Birthday" toward a surprised and laughing Abraham.)

The adaptations by the Catalan translator Manuel Forcano focused very little on the trademark comic passages in the novel such as Don Quixote's thinking windmills are giants, preferring to bring out the elegiac atmosphere in the romances of lands and loves conquered or spurned. As the lyrics filled the screen behind the stage with the language of memories and "tears of love," it was easy to read the selections as modern parallels; the name Charlemagne might be easily rendered as George W. Bush. "It's already time to pick up/Soldiers of my memory," reads one ballad sung. "Escaped and defeated/In so crazy battle." The night's music was as old as knights  but the sentiments expressed were as recent as a cable news ticker at the bottom of your TV screen. 
 

REVIEW: The Friends of Chamber Music presents
Don Quijote De La Mancha, performed by Hespèrion XXI
directed by Jordi Savall and featuring F. Murray Abraham as the Narrator
Friday, October 24 at 8:00 p.m.
Grace and Holy Cathedral, Kansas City, MO

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.