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| Mahan Esfahani (vancouversymphony.ca) |
On
November 2nd 2014 I spoke to harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani at his
London home. Born in Tehran in 1984, his father gave him his first piano
lessons. He then went on to explore his interest in harpsichord and organ in
his teen years. In 2009, Mahan Esfahani made his Wigmore Hall solo debut, then making
history with the first solo harpsichord recital ever at the London Proms of
2011. A celebrated soloist and recitalist, Mahan Esfahani has performed much in
Britain, Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan.
PH:
Mahan Esfahani, what are your earliest musical memories?
Mahan
Esfahani: My earliest memories are of my
father playing on our upright Petrov piano at home in Tehran. I guess I have no
memories that are not connected in some way to music. In 1970, Deutsche Grammophon
put out a giant set of LPs, which my father bought. It included a lot of
Beethoven works - all the symphonies (the bad stuff too, like the “Battle”
Symphony) but also works of Verdi. So I grew up hearing a lot of recordings of
Klemperer, Ferdinand Leitner (there was the great Leitner recording of
“Fidelio”), Wilhelm Kempff, etc. (This
seems ironic today, as I recently signed a contract to record on Deutsche
Grammophon!)
PH:
So you are from a musical family.
ME:
Yes, certainly. On my father’s side, they are all quite artistic: they played
music and wrote poetry. My uncle was a painter and my mother is a painter.
PH:
Would you like to say something of your early musical training?
ME:
I was five or six and was always asking my father to teach me about music. He
taught me some of the rudiments of piano – scales etc. I had such a strong
desire to play the piano and could not get enough of it. After listening to my father’s LPs, I remember
once saying to him that I wanted to do “that”. So, he taught me to play
melodies, like that of the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.9. When I
was probably around six years of age, my father sent me to a piano teacher for
lessons. I never needed to be told to practice; in fact, the worst punishment
for me was to have the piano locked! I also played the violin from age of nine.
PH:
So you did not go to a music school.
ME:
No. It was all private lessons. I studied piano throughout my childhood and
teen years. At school, I was the musician-clown, playing piano for all the
various occasions. However, what I really very much wanted to do was
composition. I was really into it when I was about 9 or 10 and all through high
school. I wrote a lot. Then I discarded most of what I had written, but kept a
couple of movements here and there – a couple of movements for string orchestra
I had written at age 14 or 15 when we were away on vacation, a few songs, a
couple of pieces for piano, a small piece for piano and violin, and some other
things. It is all charmingly mediocre. I
never took composition lessons and had nobody to guide me, but I did read books
on theory, harmony, modern music and all that.
PH:
What kindled your love for the harpsichord?
ME:
I was very interested in music history and, at some point, I read a book about
an instrument called the harpsichord, found a harpsichord kit, put it together
and started playing on the instrument. At age 17, I went off to Stanford
University, where I studied Musicology and History. (Actually, my parents were
intent on my studying medicine, but I really did not want to…which was a bit
awkward). In the Music Faculty there were a number of harpsichords. A student
friend and I would always meet for dinner on Fridays. My lessons ended around
three o’clock and he would study till six. While waiting for him, I would go to
listen to the Kirkpatrick’s complete Bach recordings, to a lot of Landowska,
Leonhardt, Koopman and Růžičková, George Malcolm and others. And then I
had some lessons. I would contact any harpsichordist coming to San Francisco
and ask them for a lesson or two. Well, I was studying Musicology for four
years, but, somehow, I was always at the harpsichord practicing. In the corner
of the harpsichord room at the university, there was a virginal and I would also
play on it. So, I just really found my own way into the field. Then there were
some summer courses I attended, one of which I took with Ed Parmenteer in
Michigan. He talked about ornamentation and that was quite interesting. I took
an ornamentation table and put it up in my dorm room and studied it. Then I
went to hear British composer Brian Ferneyhough; he lectured on modern music -
Serialism and Stockhausen. And I met American composer Lou Harrison, who, of
course, has written music for the harpsichord. So, I got into modern music, but
just on a theoretical basis.
PH:
So you finished your undergraduate studies at Stanford. Where did you go from
there?
ME:
I finished my thesis and moved to Boston, where I began to take private lessons
with (Australian-born) harpsichordist Peter Watchorn. And then I worked with
Alan Curtis. But of all the harpsichordists I had heard on recordings, I liked Czech
harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičkova’s playing the best. She heard some recitals I
played and was very encouraging.
PH:
How did you start performing?
ME:
In 2006 I played a recital in Berkeley, but my first really professional
recital - my European debut - was at a festival in Tuscany in 2007. I played a big all-Scarlatti program.
Well, I was just 23 and chose to play all the difficult pieces! My performing
career just kind-of happened. If you give one concert, another concert comes
along and then you get called for four concerts…and on it goes until you
realize you are making a living from performing. I was, however, never really a
part of the “harpsichord circle”.
PH:
What does your performance diary look like at the moment?
ME:
I play around 75 recitals a year. I’m a recitalist. That’s what I do. I do not
really play much chamber music. I don’t play in ensembles but I have played a
lot of concertos.
PH:
Do you prepare editions?
ME: Only for my own use. I did, however,
orchestrate Bach’s “Art of Fugue” for the Proms a
few years ago. I transcribe a few little concert pieces for myself.
PH:
How do you see the solo harpsichord recital stage faring at the moment?
MS:
I would like to see the harpsichord
respected as a recital instrument the way the piano and violin are! That’s my
goal. If your average concert-goer attends harpsichord recitals as he does
piano recitals, I will feel I have achieved something. Actually, there have
been no problems with the mainstream public. If there has been any resistance,
it has been from the harpsichord community itself, which does not accept the
harpsichord as a solo instrument…especially when it comes to modern music.
PH:
How do you relate to the Authentic Movement?
ME: I address it with much curiosity. I have
always read sources and continue to read them in French, German and
Italian. I think “authentic” is a
marketing trick. I believe in authentic performance, but the whole movement has
led a lot of people to teach certain mannerisms, resulting in a lot of artists
doing exactly the same thing! They seem to have a set of strict rules and
anyone who thinks outside of them is shunned.
I think that reading the sources points to the spirit of what this music
was supposed to be. I do not want anyone to stand between me and the composer. Well,
when working on contemporary music, I often have the composer sitting right
next to me by the harpsichord and that is such an advantage!
PH:
This brings me to my next question. Do you play much modern and contemporary
music?
ME:
Yes. I play a lot of modern music on the harpsichord. I think it is wonderful.
I also commission works. So, I play works by such composers as Poulenc – modern
music let’s say – but I also play music of living composers.
PH:
What contemporary composers have you played recently?
ME:
Well, I recently played a piece by a young British composer called Daniel
Kidane. He won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Composer Award and received a
commission from the society to write a work for clarinet and piano. He is very
good. I have just had a piece sent to me by a German composer called Markus Zahnhausen
and am learning a few works by Danish composer Axel Borup-Jørgensen. Then there
is Sunleif Rasmussen, another Danish composer. And I have just recorded Steve
Reich’s “Piano Phase” and Gorecki’s
Harpsichord Concerto for Deutsche Grammophon, coming out in April.
PH:
Do you see playing the harpsichord in today’s concert halls a problem?
ME:
No. It has not been an issue till now. Especially for recitals it is a
non-issue, in my view. Modern listeners’
ears become used to the fact that the harpsichord is quieter than a piano. The
decay of tone of the harpsichord comes very late and a piano is not that much
louder. The piano has a big contrast of sound, which is why you hear it so
clearly in a piano concerto. The harpsichord, on the other hand, integrates
with the sound of an ensemble.
PH:
When you are playing a recital, are you in your own private world of deep
concentration or do you sense you are communicating with your audience?
ME:
It depends. There are times when a recital is all about communication and there
are times when I want nothing more than the audience to just watch me play and
I share with them what I am doing for a couple of hours. But sometimes it is a
sort of voyeuristic act; the audience is
just watching me practice, in a sense. However,
that is also a form of communication. And, of course, performance has got to be
about communication. To some extent, I cannot resort to baby talk: I simply
have to play the piece for what it is and the people will glean from it what
they will, but, now and then, I will underline a point musically. One might
resort to unauthentic means to point out something to the listener, and I think
that is perfectly fine if the listener gets what the composer is saying.
PH:
So how do you feel on stage?
ME:
It is probably the only place where I am completely happy. You see, life is
much more difficult off stage. On stage it is easy. You do what you want to do.
There are no restrictions on stage…for me, at least. You know, I just do what I
want. I take a lot of risks; sometimes they work, sometimes they really do not
work.
PH:
In which case, recording must be a very different ball-game.
ME:
Of course, it is. You have got to commit something to disc which can bear
listening to again and again and again. That is difficult.
PH:
Do you find yourself compromising when you record?
ME:
Rather than say “compromise”, I would prefer to say “I acknowledge that what
you hear on the recording is simply the decision I made at that time”, whereas
in recitals, I will make different decisions every time on some things; but
there are some things that are obviously fixed – there are fixed variables,
fixed posts and there are variables. In
recitals, some decisions depend on what I pick up from the audience and
sometimes I might just decide to try something new that day. The performer, the
interpreter, if you like, especially in Baroque music (but actually in all
music) has a sort-of position of co-creator with the composer and that will
change as I think of new things, discover new things or realize certain
mistakes. I think there is a tacit agreement between listener and performer
that there are no fixed interpretations. Unfortunately, in the age of
recordings, we assume otherwise, but that is just not tenable.
PH:
Let’s go back to your composing. Have you returned to it?
ME: Yes. a little…for enjoyment.
PH:
Do you do anything with oriental music?
ME:
Yes. Am very interested in Eritrean
music and have been transcribing a lot of their folk music. I also like
listening to Turkish music – classical Turkish singing, Ottoman court music,
actually. This is a new-found interest;
I like non-western music. I am very keen on Bartok’s music and have started to
write some music inspired by Bartok’s style but based on Eritrean music. These are still early days of my composing,
but one is always looking for new material.
And living in London means being in a diverse city; as it happens, I
live in an area where there are a lot of Africans. It is really interesting seeing and hearing
their culture.
PH:
What composers are you performing at the moment?
ME:
A lot of Rameau, whose complete works I recorded for the Hyperion label; that recording
was released last month. Am also playing pieces of Johann Christian Bach,
Friedemann Bach, Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach… I happen to be performing
the Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 tomorrow for the London Bach Society. I am
also busy with a work by the modern Czech composer Viktor Kalabis and a
concerto by Hugo Distler, which is really great; also, a piece by Jørgensen,
whom I mentioned before, and some music by modern French composer Maurice Ohana.
Oh yes, and I am transcribing a Bach concerto to be played by mandolin player Avi
Avital and myself!
PH:
I wanted to ask you about your conducting.
ME:
I tried it for a while. It is not my thing. I could be a middling conductor,
but as a harpsichordist I feel I could really do something.
PH:
What does your average day look like?
ME:
I get up around 7 or 7:30, have tea, practise, take a walk, practise, have
lunch, practise, more tea, practise, go to the gym., have dinner, then play a
concert or go to a concert or play for an hour to an hour and a half before
bed.
PH:
Do you play fortepiano?
ME:
No.
PH:
Have you totally left the piano?
ME:
I would love to have a piano in the house at some point. Do you know what I
would play on it? I would play show tunes – I have a couple of books of Warner
Bros. pieces - and some cabaret songs. I would have friends over to sing
them…and some Kurt Weill.
PH:
What are your future plans?
ME:
There are a few big commissions coming up. Then there is a big concert of
modern harpsichord music. I shall be spending the next year working on
(although not performing) some Scarlatti from a manuscript that has recently been
discovered. I am also doing research for a book project on Landowska. And in
April, as I mentioned earlier, my first Deutsche Grammophon CD will be issued -
the Bach Concerto in D minor, Gorecki, Steve Reich…
PH:
An interesting mix.
ME:
Yes.
PH:
When it is not music, what interests you?
ME:
I read a lot. I really like Russian literature - Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, for
example, As well as a picture of Bach on my wall I also have one of Tolstoy there.
PH:
Do you read them in Russian?
ME:
No. I read their books in English, but am going to be studying Russian pretty
soon. I travel, also for fun. And I like
other cultures. They have so much to offer,
not just in language…but also clothing, cuisine, and so on. I like that. When I
was a kid I used to go to the airport just to see different kinds of people. I
am simply interested in other people.
PH:
Mahan Esfahani, many thanks for your time and for sharing so many ideas and
experiences.
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| Recital at the Israel Museum (Miri Shamir) |
