Self-Appointed Savior Of the Harpsichord
LONDON — Mahan Esfahani is a musician on a mission. “Until the harpsichord has the presence that any other mainstream instrument has, my work isn’t done,” he said.
Mr. Esfahani, 34, made his Carnegie Hall debut on May 1, and in August he is to perform at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in London.
He has also been known to cause controversy. He is outspoken on Twitter, bemoaning everything from the death of the author Philip Roth to the quality of Chinese takeout in Germany. And in his campaign to get the harpsichord on everybody’s radar, he is downright feisty.
“If the guy on the street or the guy on the flight sitting next to me doesn’t know what the harpsichord is, then we have failed,” he said. “The guy on the plane knows what a piano is.” (Piano strings are struck by a hammer; harpsichord strings are plucked.)
Mr. Esfahani, who now lives in Prague, was born in 1984 at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. When bombs started dropping on Tehran, the family moved to Maryland.
He first heard a harpsichord at the age of 9, while sitting in the library after school. It was a cassette of the Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova. (She later became Mr. Esfahani’s mentor.) But it wasn’t until his years at Stanford University in California that he studied the instrument.
Mr. Esfahani’s repertoire choices have irked some audiences. A 2016 concert in Cologne, Germany, was interrupted by booing when he played Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” over a recorded track of the first keyboard part (in a version approved by Mr. Reich); other concertgoers defended him.
In April 2017, Mr. Esfahani told Van, the online classical- music magazine, that he had heard “leading figures in the harpsichord world give recitals that were played as if someone had died. Personally, I’d rather have dental surgery than hear recitals such as these.”
Replying in the same magazine, Andreas Staier, a fellow harpsichordist, wrote that Mr. Esfahani would “sell his soul for a little publicity. A little calm would be much better. But he can’t afford it. His fame and his career have more to do with his words than with his music.”
The Spectator, a British magazine, noted that Mr. Esfahani had been “starting small wars since he launched himself a decade ago as the harpsichord’s global ambassador- cum-savior.”
But Neil Fisher, a music critic at The Times of London, described Mr. Esfahani as a “tremendously expressive artist.”
“Playfulness is a big part of him in the way he expresses himself personally and on social media, but also as a musician,” Mr. Fisher said. “That’s hugely welcome when he comes from a world that could be considered overly dry or overly academic.”
Mr. Esfahani said he tried nowadays to direct his anger at people who “go after the instrument” and dismiss it.