A new take on 1492

"We are not sole owners of our past" is how Jordi Savall begins his notes to "Lost Paradises," the exquisitely played program of music from 1400 to 1506 that he presented at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday night. What went unsaid in this concert of music from various cultures that combined and conflicted in 16th century Spain, and particularly in Granada, was that we are not sole owners of our present either.

Jews and Muslims lived together with Christians in Granada for a golden moment. However uneasy, their interactions produced a flourishing culture of arts and sciences until the Jews were exiled, Muslims were ordered to convert, and heretics were burned at the stake. Around the same time, Columbus discovered the New World. Vistas opened and closed in confusing ways. Animosities that arose 500 years ago play out today in the Middle East and elsewhere. The music tells a remarkable story.

A master of the viola da gamba, Savall is a star of the early music movement. His captivating playing on the soundtrack of "Tous les Matins du Monde" (All the Mornings of the World), the 1991 biopic about the French Baroque gambist/composers Sainte Colombe and Marin Marais, gave his then-obscure period instrument a minute or two of fame.

The bass gamba, which is played between the legs like a cello, produces an attractively antiquated sound, and Savall himself might have been perfectly typecast as a scholarly, elegant, sophisticated, lyrically inclined gambist born to serenade the soul. But this Catalan musician, who is fond of saying that a player's relationship with the gamba must include pleasure and pain, that the instrument's sound can caress or cut like a sharp knife, has lately turned the seemingly insular instrument into a tool to examine global issues.

"Lost Paradises" is a stage realization of a sumptuous book and two-CD set that Savall released two years ago. Savall's forces are varied, including his seven-member instrumental ensemble (Hesperian XXI), a male vocal quartet (La Capella Reial de Catalunya), a solo soprano (Montserrat Figueras) and two narrators (who recite and intone in Arabic, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Spanish and English).

Savall begins with a 2,000-year-old invocation from Seneca's "Medea" found in Columbus' diaries, foretelling the revelations of new worlds. He then examines an enormous variety of historical sources: Sufi music, Sephardic prayers, Andalusian dances of the period, the polyphonic liturgical style of the Roman Catholic Church, music of the Spanish court. He even includes an example of Amerindian music for flute and drums that Columbus might have brought back from the New World.