Bach connections : Mahan Esfahani at Cambridge Music Festival (work in progress)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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20 October
Bach connections : Mahan Esfahani at Cambridge Music Festival (work in progress),
Wednesday 20 October 2021 at 7.30 p.m. at Downing Place United Reformed Church
The Sonata in G Minor (Wq65/17) by C. P. E. Bach – a somewhat fractured and fissile work ? – was played with due theatricality and considerable poise for, apart from the so-called London Bach, he was the son of Johann Sebastian's who had most caught the imagination of generations after his father's, with a compositional style that was quite other than that of the master of the complexities of counterpoint and of how to craft and interweave fugal-subjects :
Mahan Esfahani gave an unfamiliar work, whose movements appeared to end with the same somewhat casual gesture (as if endings were so 1750 ?), pacing and plenty of space in which to talk, before J. S. Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (BWV 903), where there was more scope, and therefore more need, not to adopt some 'accepted' approach to performance, which can lead to oxidization and rust.
The Fantasia and Fugue had been known, first, to #UCFF from inclusion in Blandine Verlet's intense 2-LP set of Sämtliche Toccaten (The Complete Toccatas) from 1978, listened to, o'er and o'er (though latterly by making a recording on a C120 audio-cassette, rather than playing and turning and playing the vinyl) : such things, and the means that were then relatively limited for knowing more about the performer / music (beyond the immediate sleeve-notes), inevitably colour one's relations, for good or ill, to a repertoire or a piece.
Esfahani could initially be heard, slowing down the musical flow of the Fantasia in favour of its rotational or pausal elements – which was, perhaps, done in a nod both back to the affect of Emmanuel Bach², whose work he had just played, as well as forward, to that of Johann Kuhnau's Sonata, as it was to be presented to us (as one has to doubt how many there already knew or had specifically come to hear it ?).
Towards its end, Esfahani adopted a very lively, non-U manner to Bach in the energetic and vigorous delivery of notes (which some might typically call 'pounding' on the instrument's manual ?) – its vivid impressions of drama, and in no conceivable way to be mistaken (in its euphemistic sense) for authentic performance, with someone who plays so-called early music, but does not see himself as an early-music performer.
In the opening of the fugue, Esfahani was playing at a fairly modest tempo, and then, in the course of the work, started introducing special emphases, and what seemed to be² deliberate hesitations or changes of direction. At later points, he was playing very densely, such that we were presented 'a wash' of echoic sound :
To the extent that one might not have envisaged outside a piano forte and employing the sustain-pedal, or otherwise possible without the sound's being amplified or modified, and with a very pronounced bass register. (All of this began to set one wondering whether a sound-desk and speakers were in operation in the venue.)
The conclusion of the work was met with a roar of enthusiasm – though it was unclear whether for a rendition of a familiar work, from the novelty brought to it, or both. However, to judge from which Esfahani certainly seemed not to have been exaggerating, in telling Katie Derham² that there was something different about music in this city from its university rival that consisted in how audiences listen.
End-notes :
¹ When he spoke to the audience, after the BWV 903 and pacingly inhabiting the front of the performance-space, there was, as well as a suavely provocative or subversive content, a pedagogic tone to how he addressed us :
Mahan Esfahani knew, because he not only underlined the point, but also drew attention to it, that we assuredly did not know whether, in addition to having been a lawyer, etc., Kuhnau had, in fact, written a novel about a harpsichordist who was or may have been, as he put it, 'a quack' - in that there was not only a twinkle in saying that, but a sort of off-hand and slightly sotto voce 'Make of that what you will...' afterwards.
² Then again, appearing in conversation with
Katie Derham by telephone on Monday's Radio 3
In Tune (on air between 5.00 and 7.00 p.m. BST), Esfahani had not left for the UK, but, as he told us, had finished packing to travel for the recitals in Cambridge (on Wednesday), and then at Wigmore Hall (Thursday ?). [Regrettably, for some reason doubtless to due with construing the pandemic-related risk, the former was confined to one bill of fare, i.e. with no interval, despite four works on the bill (as one had heard had been the case at other CMF concerts).]
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
