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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: Scarlatti

The Mahan Esfahani Challenge

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Interviews, Music Education, Other Artists

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BBC New Generation Artist, British Broadcasting Corporation, Chinese, Cinderella, commission, counterpoint, decibel, Gramophone, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, harpsichord, invention, Iranian, Jews, keyboard, London, long-playing record, Mahan Esfahani, Michael Church, musicology, organ, Persian, Persian tuning, Philip Roth, piano, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Russian, Scarlatti, score, Stanford University, Steinway & Sons, Tehran, The Independent, tuning, Twitter, Wanda Landowska, Wigmore Hall

Mahan Esfahani

Mahan Esfahani

Ten years ago Mahan Esfahani was by his own account a nerdy anorak at Stanford University, obsessively tutoring himself with the aid of old records in the hope of realizing what seemed an impossible dream – to make his living on that Cinderella of keyboard instruments, the harpsichord.

A few months ago, now thirty, he carried off the award for Gramophone magazine’s Baroque instrumental album of the year, and the Guildhall School has appointed him professor of harpsichord. Not bad from a standing start, and for a total outsider. But perhaps – in addition to exceptional talent, and sheer slog – that outsiderness is the key.

When he was four, he and his parents left Tehran to join the Iranian expatriate community in America, where making good financially was the imperative. Mahan started playing the piano at six and developed an obsession with Bach from the moment he was first given the score of a two-part invention. “The counterpoint sounded so exotic as to be almost Chinese, and so logical” – he dashes over to my piano to demonstrate – “that I knew I was going to spend a lot of time with music like that. Something clicked for me.”

But his parents wanted him to be a doctor, and at Stanford he started a pre-med course, only to realize after two lectures that it wasn’t for him. Law was their next idea – “as I like talking” – but he gravitated instead to the organs and harpischords of the music faculty and began to immerse himself in scores, contemporary accounts of Baroque music-making and the recordings of his heroes, with the great harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who had been virtually self-taught, prominent among them.

His next eureka moment came when he heard a recording by that sacred monster of harpsichordism, Wanda Landowska: “And I realized why the Bach I had been playing and hearing had never sounded quite right. I now know that she wasn’t particularly ‘authentic,’ but to me she got the spirit of Bach, and I think he would have nodded in approval if he’d heard her play. What I like about her is [that she doesn’t] let a set of prescribed rules for performance practice dictate what [she’ll] do with the music.”  This is said with a pugilistic fire to which we will return.

Without a harpsichord of his own, and with no agent or sponsor, he knocked about playing to anyone who would listen until 2008, when an invitation came out of the blue to join up as a BBC New Generation Artist. “They’d been quietly watching me. They said it need not entail much, and I wouldn’t have to live in London; I’d just do a couple of projects per year. I replied that I didn’t actually have a career, I didn’t have any concerts planned, and I had no income, so why didn’t I just come to Britain? And I presented them with a long list of projects I could do. I came here to live, and one thing led to another.” One of the perks of the scheme was a Wigmore recital which got him his first-ever reviews (one of them by me). “That was my first properly paid concert – when I got the check from the Wigmore I’d never seen that much money, £1,800! I thought – wow – I could really make this work.”

But he’s not averse, when necessary, to biting the hand that feeds him, and the BBC’s obsession with presenting the musicians of the past as being “just like us” makes him bristle with scorn. “That’s really dumb – people in the past were very different. If you ever found your grandmother’s habits strange, how could you seriously imagine that you could understand people who lived three centuries ago? We laugh when we hear recordings from eighty years ago, so how can we possibly claim to know how music was played in the much more distant past?”

More ire is directed at the early-music industry. Disdaining the conventional keyboardist’s tight-arsed silence – “This isn’t a gun club, it’s music!” – he talks to his audience, illuminatingly and amusingly, between the pieces he performs: he may be a serious musicologist, but he wears his learning lightly.

Get him on prevailing attitudes to his instrument, and he really takes off, becoming very exercised about critics who, while praising his recordings, add the ritual rider that his playing “transcends the harpsichord’s limitations.” “If someone comes up to me on Twitter and says they hate the harpsichord, I always offer them a free ticket, saying come and see what you think. And nobody has ever said afterwards that they didn’t like it. They say ‘I didn’t know that it could sing like that’. But of course it can, it’s an incredibly vocal instrument. Its sound is clear and precise, and has a great deal of color.” And the spurious contest between harpsichord and Steinway should emphatically not, he argues, be seen in terms of decibels. “That shirt you are wearing is not a ‘loud’ shirt, but it has a lot of colors in it, it’s loud in a different way. The harpsichord enables you to hear much more subtlety, and it has a sensual quality. If any pianist wants to slam it” – and one prominent pianist routinely does – “be ready to have a public discussion with me, and have a piano and a harpsichord ready on stage.” Any takers?

This engaging contrarian is full of future plans, including a Scarlatti splurge, new commissions for his instrument, and – something really original – commissioning a keyboard that will allow Persian tuning. He leads a dedicated life, practicing most of the day and reading fiction by the great Russian masters plus his favorite American novelist, Philip Roth. ‘“An American Jew, he speaks to me as an Iranian – the irony, the overbearing mother, the guilt complex.” How Iranian does Esfahani feel? The answer comes out like machine-gun fire: “I’m sentimental, quick to judge, and quick to apologize; I’m a loyal friend; I like good food; and I hang on every word from my mother. Yes, I’m very Iranian.”

And his ultimate ambition? “To record on the harpsichord every keyboard piece Bach wrote. I reckon it will take me twenty years.” That’s him sorted, then.

Michael Church – The Independent

John Eliot Gardiner Conducts an Art Tour

20 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Interviews, Other Artists

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Beethoven, Benda, Bleib bei uns denn es will Abend werden, cantata, Caravaggio, Christ lag in Todesbanden, composition, Couperin, Cupid Complaining to Venus, Easter, Goya, iconography, John Eliot Gardiner, L'Orfeo, Latin, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, Monteverdi, Monteverdi Choir, Music in the Castle of Heaven, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, painting, Scarlatti, St. Luke, The Supper at Emmaus, Weimar

Cupid Complaining to Venus

Cupid Complaining to Venus

“That certain artists and composers are of the same generation doesn’t always mean that there is a significant link between them. But Goya and Beethoven share the sense of being possessed by inner demons. They also share an awareness of humanity at its most squalid and disreputable – particularly in the context of war,” observes Sir John Eliot Gardiner. A revolutionizing exponent of the music of Claudio Monteverdi and Johann Sebastian Bach as well as Ludwig van Beethoven, Mr. Gardiner is the founding music director of the Monteverdi Choir and the period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Having discovered his profound interest in relationships between art and music during an informal conversation [last] year, I arranged for us to resume this discussion at London’s National Gallery.

Our conversation touched on Mr. Gardiner’s forthcoming book on Bach, scheduled for British publication [in] September [of 2013]. “It’s less a conventional biography,” he explains, “than a series of fourteen contextualizing approaches to Bach through the music.” For instance, one chapter explores “the family ramifications and what it meant to be a Bach, while comparing Europe’s parallel musical dynasties at the time: the Bachs in Germany, the Scarlattis in Italy, the Bendas of Bohemia and the Couperins in France. Another chapter . . . investigates Bach’s relationship to Martin Luther and the complexity of the religious element in Bach’s music. And on it goes.”

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther’s close friend and portraitist, is a painter Mr. Gardiner identifies with Bach. “Cranach is so much part of Lutheran iconography that he’s an inescapable part of Bach’s heritage, and Bach must have been introduced to his work during his years in Weimar, where Cranach’s house still stands.”

Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus (c. 1525) uses pagan imagery to present a Lutheran moral that Bach would have recognized. The winged child of the goddess of love protests being stung by bees while stealing a honeycomb. A Latin inscription in the upper right reads, “life’s pleasure mingled with pain.”

“I always feel the plague and the Dance of Death hovering in the background of Cranach’s work,” Mr. Gardiner says. “And death plagued Bach throughout his life. He was orphaned at nine, and as an adult lost ten or eleven of his twenty-three children, not to mention his first wife. Bach so wonderfully evokes the concept of the Dance of Death in his Easter cantata, Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4), based on Martin Luther’s eponymous hymn of the Resurrection and the struggle between life and death.”

The Supper at Emmaus

The Supper at Emmaus

Related to this theme, Caravaggio‘s powerfully emotional The Supper at Emmaus (1601) is a painting whose resonance, for Mr. Gardiner, embraces Bach, Beethoven and Caravaggio’s contemporary Monteverdi. Caravaggio depicts the post-Crucifixion episode, in St. Luke, when an apparent stranger sups at an inn with two of Christ’s disciples. As he blesses the bread, the disciples recognize him as Christ. To the two disciples Caravaggio adds a bemused innkeeper.

“By means of sharp light and shadow, gesture and illusion, Caravaggio re-creates the sheer wonderment of a miracle. At the center is this beardless, tranquil stranger whose hand raised in benediction almost reaches out beyond the canvas to the viewer. The two disciples react so differently to their sudden awareness – the one on the right with his outstretched arms seems ready to embrace Christ. The disciple on the left stares at Christ’s face and is ready to spring from his chair in astonishment and joy. Meanwhile the puzzled innkeeper can’t understand what’s going on.”

The disciples’ excited gestures are those of everyday people, I note. The whole composition embodies realistic shock. Everything around the calm central figure is off-balance; shadows are exaggerated as if caused by a flash of light, a fruit basket teeters at the table’s edge. Hands balloon out of proportion – fingertips oversized, arms foreshortened. Caravaggio confronts us with a silent emotional explosion that transcends even the most eloquent speech.

“You certainly find this emotion in Monteverdi,” Mr. Gardiner says. “Consider the moment in his opera L’Orfeo, when Orfeo learns of Euridice’s death and responds with a single word, the soft, anguished cry, ‘Ohimè (Alas).’ Yet over a century after Monteverdi’s day, Caravaggio’s emotion resonates strongly in Bach’s cantatas for the second and third days of Easter, especially the wonderful Road to Emmaus, Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden (BWV 6). And this epochal, iconoclastic work anticipates Beethoven, indeed all those subversive composers who would not follow the rules.”

Barrymore Laurence Scherer – The Wall Street Journal

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