‘People constantly misjudge the harpsichord’
Brash, outrageous and unconventional, virtuoso Mahan Esfahani is shaking up classical music. He unveils his radical manifesto to Ivan Hewett
Among classical musicians, the harpsichordist is the one nobody notices. He (for some reason it is usually he) is that person seated at a quaintly old-fashioned keyboard decorated with mythological scenes, in the middle of a small Baroque orchestra, making tasteful tinkly noises while everyone admires the flashy violinist.
If they give a solo recital, be sure to sit close; their instrument is notoriously quietly spoken. Harpsichordists are the same.
They’re not exactly rock ’n’ roll. They like to argue abstruse points of ornamentation about a French Baroque composer you’ve never heard of. Until Mahan Esfahani came along.
This pugnaciously voluble 34-yearold American harpsichordist of Iranian parentage makes waves by playing contemporary works that are noisy and far from polite. It’s true he plays Bach and Rameau, like a normal harpsichordist, but with a hair-raising rhythmic energy and freedom, prefaced with onstage talks where words tumble out with dizzying speed. And he likes to pick a fight. In the online classical music magazine VAN he described recitals by his elders and betters that were “played as if someone had died”.
He also mocked an unnamed younger player, saying: “Having funky hair or playing a little bit of jazz doesn’t make you iconoclastic if your playing is perfectly orthodox.”
And, yet, when I meet Esfahani, it’s in the London church in which Handel used to worship, where he’s preparing for a joint recital with revered Baroque cellist Pieter Wispelwey. It’s hard to imagine anything more straight-down- the-line “early music”, but what Esfahani is eager to talk about is the concert of harpsichord and electronics he’s giving later this month. How did it come about? “Well, I am always being asked to play the same pieces over and over again,” he says with that carefully modulated, East Coast-intellectual voice, “and I thought, ‘Well, let’s do something provocative, but really substantial’. There are musicians who talk the talk when it comes to being radical, but don’t really walk the walk.”
Esfahani has made good on his boast; the concert in Milton Court Concert Hall has classic modernist pieces by Berio and Cage, alongside two new pieces that he’s commissioned, one of them from a young Iranian composer. “It’s amazing how many wonderful Iranian composers there are in Europe,” he assures me, “and more than half are women.”
But isn’t there something perverse about dragging this quintessentially old instrument into the 21st century? “But it’s not an old instrument,” Esfahani insists. “It’s as contemporary as any other. People constantly misjudge the instrument, including a certain critic
– if you don’t mind me being provocative for a moment,” he says, giving me a look and hurrying on before I have a chance to object.
“You said in a review that ‘Esfahani plays so expressively that one forgets what an inexpressive instrument the harpsichord is’, and other people have said the same, because the instrument can’t play gradations of loud and soft. But I say, if people keep praising me for being expressive, then there’s obviously no problem with the harpsichord being expressive!” Touché.
There’s clearly something eating Esfahani, something bigger than a common misperception about the nature of the harpsichord. It comes out when we move on to the mystery of how the son of Iranian immigrants living in “a mediocre suburb of a mediocre city” (by which Esfahani means Washington DC), became passionate about the instrument. “Well, one of my uncles would give me cassettes of classical music,” he says, “and one of them was of harpsichord concertos. I became obsessed by this and recordings of any other music I could lay my hands on, I was quite obsessed. And then one day I went to a concert in a Washington church of Bach harpsichord concertos. I asked afterwards if I could play it and they let me play a few notes. And afterwards I thought, ‘OK, I think I’d like to spend my life with this instrument’.”
The route from that childhood epiphany to fully fledged professional was long and winding, going via a history degree at Stanford University, studying the organ in Milan, plus the harpsichord on the side, giving some concerts here and there, and then, out of the blue, receiving a BBC New Generation Artists award in 2008.
“All Hail the BBC!” he says. “That was a real turning point.” But it was during that ascent that Esfahani encountered what he still feels is an endemic snobbery in the early music world, riven by competing schools. “At festivals I noticed the French players wouldn’t go to the Dutch players’ concerts, and everyone sneered at the Russians.” And where did he fit? “Well, I didn’t. It was assumed that being Iranian I couldn’t possibly understand these subtleties. One promoter said to me, ‘You’re from the South, you should play Scarlatti’. I mean, how dumb is that?” he says with that sarcasm that’s always waiting to spring out and get him into trouble.
However, Esfahani is keen to stress he’s not complaining. “Hey, I’m doing fine. My parents think I’m crazy to be in this business, they keep asking when I’ll get a proper job. But one thing I learnt from my father is: never act like a complaining, angry minority. Just work harder.”
At heart, he is a rugged individualist. “I really think,” he says, “anyone can be whatever they want to be, if they work hard and believe passionately in what they’re doing.”
Mahan Esfahani plays at the Barbican’s Milton Court, London EC2 tonight (020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk) and at the Wigmore Hall, London W1, on March 13, (020 7935 2141; wigmore-hall.org.uk). His album, The Passinge Mesures, is released on Hyperion
‘At festivals, French players wouldn’t go to the Dutch players’ concerts and they all sneered at the Russians’