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Tess Knighton, Montserrat Figueras, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 2, May 2012, Page 352, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas066
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On 30 January 2012 the soaring pillars of the church of Santa María del Mar in Barcelona resonated once more to the extraordinary voice of Montserrat Figueras: a voice as clear as a bell, a voice as dark-hued and full of profound shadows as the candlelit church itself. On that occasion, however, that individual, almost legendary voice was recorded: Figueras had died on 23 November 2011 in the house she shared with her husband, gamba-player Jordi Savall, in Bellaterra, Barcelona. She first met Savall in the early 1960s, when they were both studying the cello; she, too, had learnt the gamba, studying with Cécilie Dolmetsch in Haslemere in 1966, but only two years later the Savalls had moved to Basle and she began to study singing with Andrea von Rahm and Thomas Binkley at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Although she started to perform as a singer from about 1970, it was not until 1974 that she was one of the founder members, together with Savall, Lorenzo Alpert and Hopkinson Smith, of the ensemble Hespèrion XX, and the rest, as they say, was history. The following year their double album Musique séculière de l’Espagne chrétienne et juive 1540–1550 was released on the EMI Reflexe label, and thus began a series of recordings that garnered prizes (including several Grammys) and made early Spanish music available and accessible to the musical world. In 1997, the couple formed their own record label, Alia Vox, and the rate of recordings increased, and became increasingly luxurious in presentation and information, for example their book-CD Dinastia Borgia. Esglèsia i poder al Renaixement for which they received a further Grammy award in 2011. The distinctive sound-world of Hespèrion XX (from 2000, Hespèrion XXI) owed much to Figueras’s voice, floating high and clear above the rich instrumentation of the ensemble; she also initiated and devised many of its projects. Her interest in the different musics of the Iberian Peninsula, notably the influence of the Arabic and Jewish oral traditions, formed a thread running through the ensemble’s many recordings, from the start through the Diáspora Sefardí (2001) to one of her last, Jerusalem, la ciutat de les dues paus (2008). She believed passionately that these traditions had not only enriched Spanish musical culture but also endowed its vocal tradition with a ‘mystic inspiration’, and infused it with ‘a tragic force, a bittersweet sense of nostalgia’.
