Musique? by Mahan Esfahani review: harpsichord as you've never heard it before
This engrossing new release offers a collection of six modern pieces for the harpsichord played by the well-known American-born harpsichordist of Iranian extraction, Mahan Esfahani. The earliest was composed in 1960, the latest in 2018, and the composers hail from six different countries. The very idea of “modern music for harpsichord” seems a contradiction in terms, because there’s something stubbornly antique about the sound of a harpsichord. Even when it’s being used to play jagged little modernist fragments or hammered clusters like the ones in the Jaws soundtrack, the sound never quite shakes off its Baroque associations. Add to that the suggestively otherworldly sounds of electronics which are mingled into three of the pieces, and you have a disc that seems more like a gauntlet thrown down to the listener than an offer of enjoyment. That would certainly be in character. Esfahani likes to be provocative, and it probably gives him a gleeful pleasure to offer up a disc that so completely upends the common view of what a harpsichord is. But it’s a risky move. Some listeners, faced with the question implied by the title Musique? – “Is this really music?” – will be tempted to answer with a resounding “non”.
That would be a shame, because there’s much to enjoy and be moved by on this disc. The first piece Rain Dream is one of those delightfully evocative and mournful evocations of nature the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu wrote in his later years. The fact that the super-sharp recording allows you to hear the faint creakings and resonances of the harpsichord adds to the music’s gentle water-streaked pathos. By contrast the Set of Four by that pioneer American experimentalist Henry Cowell makes overt nods to Baroque-era harpsichord music. The set contains a grand overture in the form of a Rondo, an angular little fugue, a pompous Chorale, and a moto perpetuo that occasionally sounds like atonal Handel. There are more Handelian echoes in the piece entitled After Handel’s Vesper by British composer Gavin Bryars, though it is less musically satisfying.
Then there are the three pieces that combine the sharply defined sounds of the harpsichord with the more soft-edged, atmospheric ones of electronics. The contrast was especially acute in Jardin Secret (Secret Garden) II by the Finn Kaija Saariaho, where the electronic sounds were constructed from breathy recordings of the composer’s own voice. More satisfying to me was the piece specially written for this record: Intertwined Distances by the Iranian female composer Anahita Abbasi. (Iran has produced several interesting female modernist composers in recent years – who would have thought it?) After a disconcertingly dry beginning it develops into a fascinating dialogue between opposites that sometimes come to within a hair’s breadth of each other, only to part again.
Most rewarding of all is the longest and last piece on the disc, by the French composer Luc Ferrari. A series of flourishes on the harpsichord ushers in a faint electronic drone, which soon develops an insistent rhythmic pulse against which the harpsichord sometimes fights, sometimes yields, an idea projected with a sure sense of dramatic timing and telling variety of colour by Esfahani. The ending, in which he adds decorative wisps to a high cicada-like chirruping, is beautifully poetic. Putting together this CD has clearly been a labour of love for Esfahani; let’s hope listeners respond with the curiosity and sympathy it deserves.
Musique? is out now from Hyperion
