Jerusalem

Jordi Savall and his troupe of performers make a speciality of thematically linked concerts and CD sets that bring together works from diverse cultures and group them around a meaty historical concept. Savall has devised a number of these evening-long sequences, and for the only British appearance on their current European tour at the Norfolk and Norwich festival, he chose his musical portrait of Jerusalem – a potted history of the city in seven parts, from Old Testament times until the end of the Ottoman empire in 1917, ending with a multilingual plea for reconciliation and peace. The whole thing is an expertly engineered package, involving more than 40 musicians. Singers and players from Israel, Palestine, Armenia, Greece and Iraq reinforce Savall's ensemble Hespèrion XXI and the voices of La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and the range of instruments is vast. The soprano Montserrat Figueras doubles on zither, while the other main singer, Begoña Olavide, also plays the psaltery. There are medieval harps, a hurdy-gurdy, a pair of ouds and an array of even less familiar plucked and thrummed instruments, together with a whole squadron of shofars and anfirs, trumpets made of ram's horn and brass, which launches the whole performance with a fanfare composed by Savall himself. These sounds are certainly seductively exotic, and the expertise of the performances impressive, but the true significance of the result is more doubtful. Many of the items included, whether psalms, crusader songs, hymns to the virgin, papal pronouncements or extracts from the Qur'an, are not specific to Jerusalem, and one could probably concoct a similar history of Damascus or even Constantinople incorporating much of the same material. It's dangerously close to a rather superficial kind of musical tourism.