Mahan Esfahani BACH The Toccatas

Bach's first biographer, Johann Forkel, dubbed BWV910 - 916 ‘Jugendübungen’, but the toccatas are decidedly more than 'youthful exercises. In them the emerging composer cut his teeth in the flamboyant, improvisatory ‘phantasticus' style, and delved into improbably extended fugal writing (the C minor’s spreading luxuriantly across ten pages in the Bärenreiter Urtext). They overflow with the passions and excesses of youth, and, consumed end-to-end, can make for a daunting listen. But under Mahan Esfahani’s fleet fingers, and even fleeter imagination, they positively fly—invigorating vehicles for his custom-built harpsichord complete with thunderous 16-foot stop whose bottom Ds in BWV913 sound like heralds of the apocalypse.

If his fondness for the 16-foot beast can occasionally become a little wearying, and the instrument’s hearty resonance in a closely recorded sound picture sometimes obtrudes, these are readily forgotten as Esfahani continually finds more in the music than the page might suggest. (There’s a section in the F sharp minor where Bach surrenders to a sequence that goes round and round like a piece of forlorn luggage abandoned on an airport carousel!) Fugues that in other performances outstay their welcome simply don’t. Esfahani perfectly understands the toccatas’ architecture, yet celebrates their quirkiness and, interrogating every note, is generous with expressive pauses. Perhaps the D major’s first Allegro is a tad brusque, but the über-phantasticus opening to the D minor is relished to its Gothic hilt; the pacing of the epic C minor fugue is masterly; and its G minor cousin’s all-consuming swagger is irresistible. (Paul Riley)

Mahan Esfahani BACH Goldberg Variations

”Count Kayserling, formerly Russian Ambassador at the Court of the Elector of Saxony, who frequently resided in Leipzig…once said t Bach that he should like to have some clavier pieces for his [court harpsichordist] Goldberg, which should be of such a soft and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought he could best fulfil this wish by variations, which, on account of the constant sameness of the fundamental harmony, he had hitherto considered as an ungrateful task. But as at this time all his works were models of art, these variations also became such under his hand…Bach was, perhaps, never so well rewarded for any work as for this: the Count made him a present of a golden goblet, filled with a hundred Louis d’or. But their worth as a work of art would not have been paid if the present had been a thousand times as great.”

So wrote Sebastian Bach’s first biographer J.N. Forkel in his brief account of the master’s life (1802). Whether a story with such fantastic overtones (the hundred gold coins, an insomniac Count) is true is, however, irrelevant when compared to the very legendary quality of this music itself. Even when compared to the whole of Bach’s considerable and varied output, the ‘Goldberg’ Variations stand out as an example of their creator’s total compositional originality. In conceiving such a work, Bach had no discernible models as regards the Goldbergs’ larger-scale architectonics or the exploitation of innovations in keyboard technique and figuration. Desirous as every listener and melamine is of surrendering oneself to the sheer aural beauty of this music – after all, Bach’s own title page specifically states his work to be ”prepared for the soul’s delight” (Gemueths-Ergetzung) – any listener of Bach’s music has a responsibility to familiarise himself with the constructs and aims that drove Bach to commit this music to posterity. We must not forget that while Bach was no academic, he was certainly a thinking man. He confronted his spiritual and intellectual questions, stated his vision of the universe, and perhaps even grappled with the joys and disappointments of his life through the medium of the written note.

The Goldberg Variations are amongst the mere handful of works written in any time or place that truly require a sort of road-map for the listener. Unlike, say, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Handel (op. 31), the successive movements of Bach’s work are not considered solely in terms of ”musical-emotional cause and effect” (e.g., textural variety for its own sake, meant to inspire solely visceral responses). Rather, our Bach constructed these variations on a pre-conceived plan: most obviously, the thirty variations are made up of ten groups of three, in which a movement of what the scholar Peter Williams has called a ”clear-genre piece” (a dance, a fugue, an overture, an arioso, et al.) is followed by a virtuoso piece featuring the crossing of the hands and then by a canon. In turn, each successive canon is composed with reference to successively rising intervals: Therefore, variation 3 is a canon at the unison, whereas variation 6 is at the second, and so on and so forth until variation 27, a canon at the ninth. As I will further argue below, Bach’s plan may even have a narrative intent, which is perhaps why variation 30 breaks the cycle of canons. Aesthetically speaking, some of the variations seem even to be used as dramatic foils to one another – hence, the bittersweet cantilena of variation 13 is answered with the schizophrenic exuberance of variation 14, and the question posed by the inconclusive ending of variation 15 is followed by a stately overture in variation 16.

To say a brief word or two on matters of keyboard technique in Bach’s work, it may the case – in spite of the usual tones of orthodox Bach scholarship! – that Bach did not always work in a total inspirational vacuum. Interestingly, only three years before Bach engraved and printed his variations, 1738 saw the publication of a set of pieces famous for introducing the world to hand-crossings and devilish keyboard acrobatics: Domenico Scarlatti’s Essercizi. There are further interesting parallels – for one, Scarlatti’s volume also contains thirty movements. Who is to say that Bach would not have known of these pieces? After all, he knew many a publication of music from the libraries of his erudite friends and kinsmen, and even a subscription list for the Paris printing of quartets by Telemann lists a ”M[onsieur] Bach, de Leipsic.”

After considering but a few structural aspects of Bach’s work, we may ask one final question. What drove Bach to compose such a work? Even if the story of the insomniac Count is true, such legends can never really explain a composer’s compulsion to actually say something as an artist and creator. Personally, I venture to guess that the answer may be found in Bach’s own life. What was happening around and perhaps a few years before 1741?

Bach’s letters from the late 1730s show a man who felt persecuted and misunderstood and who also suffered a great deal of personal pain. In a series of letters from 1738, we see that Bach’s troubled son Johann Gottfried Bernhard had skipped town from an important position as an organist in Muehlhausen due to having accrued considerable debts. For almost two years, J.S. Bach lost track of his son, who eventually died, away from home, in Jena (of what? and how?) at the age of 24. He wrote in one letter, desperate in trying to find his son: ”I must bear my cross in patience, and leave my unruly son to God’s patience alone….” Equally significant, I think, is a letter from the Leipzig Town Council, dated 17 March 1739, pointing out to Bach that the performance of the St. John Passion is to be cancelled because of not having been officially approved by the Council. Bach’s understated and obviously hurt reply cannot but inspire sadness in even the most hard-hearted reader: ”he [Bach] answered:…he did not care, for he got nothing out of it anyway, and it was only a burden.”

The effect of these and other tribulations was considerable – recent scholarship on the Bach cantatas shows that by the late 1730s the composer stopped regularly writing new cantatas and mostly resigned himself to performances of works by other composers. Rather, in his last decade, he turned inward and wrote his finest music in genres that had mostly gone out of fashion or were musically and intellectually far above the heads of his contemporaries: the Goldberg Variations (1741), the Musical Offering (1747), and the Art of Fugue (1749-1750). No one noticed – the Art of Fugue, for example, didn’t even sell enough copies to pay for the copper plates used to engrave them – and he didn’t care. As far as Bach was concerned, to paraphrase a remark made by Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s unforgettable ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ his audience was himself and God – ”a pretty good public, that.”

The thirtieth variation – the ”Quodlibet” – may have something to do with this. According to various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, the quodlibet was a genre defined by the simultaneous singing of various popular tunes. According to Bach’s sons, Bach family members would meet and sing quodlibets and ”laugh heartily” (Forkel). Being variation 30, however, this piece should instead be a canon according to the pattern set out in the rest of the work. But Bach decides to conclude on a different note altogether, with the combination of these tunes:

(a) Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest
”I have been so long away from you”

(b) Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben
”Cabbage and beets have driven me away”

Perhaps these songs are allusion to jokes within the family. Or, in considering Bach’s own life, could the first song in particular allude to something deeper? Again, back to Bach and where he was in life in the early 1740s: by this point, several of his children were dead, as were his first wife, his parents (who both had died by the time he was ten years of age), and his brothers; he lived in a town in which a group of faceless councillors desultorily insulted or ignored his work, and in most of Germany the name ”Bach” generally referred to one of his sons. He probably still felt the stung of his being hired as the Cantor of the Thomaskirche in 1723, when a councillor wrote that ”since a first or second-rate candidate cannot be procured, we must settle for a mediocre one.”

So what is the quodlibet about, then? In nine canons, we have climbed the steps to perfection (9 = 3×3, 3 being the ”perfect” number of the Trinity), and what is our reward in Heaven? We get to see our family. Maybe Bach remembered a song from his childhood, or a joke told by his brothers, or imagined – as adults – his children who died in infancy. And the repetition of the aria at the end? Briefly allowed to see his family in Paradise, our Bach wakes up. It was all a dream after all. In this variation, I am forever reminded of an unforgettable song from the great Johnny Cash:

“Daddy sang bass (Mama sang tenor)
Me and little brother would join right in there
Singin’ seems to help a troubled soul
One of these days and it won’t be long
I’ll rejoin them in a song
I’m gonna join the family circle at the throne….”

Academically, there is no proof of this narrative intent, but in my mind, Bach’s music itself leaves no doubt of something deeper. We can explain his music with all the charts and tables and numbers we want, but that only explains how. If we are going to listen to Bach, play his music, and love him, then we have to answer this: why.

(Mahan Esfahani)

Anne-Sophie Mutter THE CLUB ALBUM Live from Yellow Lounge

In May 2015 Anne-Sophie Mutter put her noble, impressively named “Lord Dunn-Raven” Stradivarius through more than its usual paces. For a change, rather than standing on stage in one of the world’s renowned grand concert halls, she spent two evenings playing in a tiny graffiti-scrawled nightclub in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. The name of the club was Neue Hei- mat, or “new home”, and on two evenings in early summer it was jam-packed with hip young people. The atmosphere heated up in the usual way for such clubs, but not in the usual way for Anne- Sophie Mutter’s concerts. As she later put it: “It wasn’t good for the Strad’s wood. I’m the sort of person who usually sweats discreetly beneath my clothes. But it was extremely hot in the club, and in the long run it put a big strain on the varnish. So to prevent the original varnish from becoming damaged we applied a thin protective coat to the Strad where it touches my bare skin. But any instrument over 300 years old is bound to show signs of wear and tear.” 

But what’s a Strad doing in a Berlin nightclub? And how did a world-famous violinist wind up in such a place? What looks at first glance like a mistake is, in fact, nothing more than a logical next step for a musician who has always wanted to move forward and who knows that her genre, so called “classical music”, must explore new venues and fresh strategies lest it be mothballed as yesterday’s art. Where is classical music, whose very name spells tradition, headed in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? To a posh concert hall or sometines even to a stylish nightclub? “It felt like I was in the lion’s den. But I definitely wanted to put the audience in touch with the music I love and believe in, music that packs such a huge emotional punch. An audience which, sad to say, I’ll never find in the Philharmonie. So I thought to myself: OK, if there’s a bunch of people who’ll never go to the Philharmonie, I’ll have to go to them. I’ll ‘stalk’ them, so to speak, and go to their club.” 

The first challenge was to find a repertoire suitable for a club gig. How demanding should it be? How “easy” should it not be? Difficult questions, to be sure, and no wonder that the choice of repertoire was at the top of Ms Mutter’s agenda: “I looked at a lot of repertoire, and I really mean a lot. The result was a kaleidoscopic view of the variety of music history, and the variety of music for the violin.” Anne-Sophie Mutter was accompanied on both club appearances by pianist Lambert Orkis and her own Virtuosi, young scholarship holders from her foundation for up- and-coming talent: “I definitely wanted to put my Virtuosi on stage. They’re an integral part of my life. They come from Austria, Poland, the United States, South Korea, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Russia and Spain, and they have ideas as to what music can accomplish in society. In the final analysis, the point is to come together with music and to build bridges, not between generations, but between the cultural differences we’ve erected, between the religious and sometimes dogmatic walls that stand between us. As Heine so nicely put it, ‘Beneath our clothes we’re all naked’.” 

And so the Yellow Lounge programme came about, ranging from the Baroque to the present day. Obviously Vivaldi, the master of tone-painting, had to be there with his Four Seasons. Then came the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, the Jamaican Rumba, Gershwin’s Preludes, Aaron Copland’s country fiddling and the title theme from Schindler’s List. An expertly prepared journey from past to present.

Even so, the world star had butterflies in her stomach when it was about to begin. “I was very tense, and I’m otherwise never nervous. It was perhaps the first time in my life that I had to struggle with expectations.” But as soon as she stepped onto the stage, surrounded by her musicians and an attentive audience, and tucked her trusty Strad under her chin, she seemed completely present and yet remote, engrossed in her playing. The music she otherwise plays behind a sort of cordon sanitaire in the world’s great concert halls acquired an incredible intensity, if only from her proximity to the listeners. She guided her musicians through the programme with passion and sangfroid, chatted and joked with listeners in a manner barely imaginable in the places where classical music is normally at home. All this did the music a good turn, emphasizing its vitality and, yes, it’s modernity. The audience, to Ms Mutter’s great joy, was equally euphoric in its response: “The applause was moving. But the other side of emotionality in a concert is the sharing of silence, listening with subtlety, tension, perhaps even amazement. And that’s something I sensed particularly strongly in the club. It’s precisely what music builds on, what it waits for: to grow from the intimacy of silence, from completely personal and sometimes whispered meaning into a giant flower, a grand message. I will always cherish the enthusiasm of the audience in these two intimate club appearances – that we managed to become truly one in the silence and the sharing of this very intimate moment.” 

And the Strad? It had to be sent for maintenance work to what its owner calls “The Spa”, where everything about the noble instrument would be tidied up to meet the challenges of new centuries and exciting new venues. (Christoph Dallach)

Mahan Esfahani TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST

If you buy only one record of harpsichord music in your life . . . buy this sensational album. The 30-year-old Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani has been making waves among connoisseurs for several years. Now he emerges as a superstar whose musicianship, imagination, virtuosity, cultural breadth and charisma far transcends the ivory tower in which the harpsichord has traditionally been placed . . . Where necessary, Esfahani is brilliantly accompanied by Concerto Köln. Even their final performance -- of JS Bach¿s Vivaldi-inspired harpsichord concerto in D Minor, with its plangently lyrical slow movement -- has a delicious twist. In the last movement Esfahani inserts a flamboyant cadenza by Brahms, of all people. A truly magical mash-up of times past, present and future.

(Record Review / Richard Morrison, The Times (London) / 08. May 2015)

Avi Avital VIVALDI

If Avi Avital’s intention is to do for the mandolin what Andrés Segovia did for the classical guitar, he’s already well on the way. Appropriate then that this, his third and possibly best release to date, should feature three Vivaldi concertos popular with guitarists. This homage to Venice’s favourite musical son in many ways picks up where Avital’s terrific debut recording of JS Bach concertos left off. This time, the mandolin’s on home turf, not only returning to its Italian roots but in one case rejoicing in a concerto actually written for it.

Avital and the superb Venice Baroque Orchestra make the C major Mandolin Concerto, RV425, their own, the pizzicato strings and organ continuo the rich clay into which Avital carves his crisp, fluid lines. But even better is the utterly thrilling account of ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons. Here, as throughout, Avital’s astonishingly smooth legato playing is broken up by rapid détaché passages and propulsive strums that sweep through the music like electrical storms, perfectly complementing the orchestra’s crisp, light string-playing and spooky sul ponticello effects in the slow movement.

As a respite from the concertos’ high drama, there’s an exquisite account of the C major Trio Sonata, originally for violin and lute with continuo. Avital again takes the violin’s part, while harpsichord duties fall to the brilliant Mahan Esfahani, recently signed to DG. The gentle final track, where Avital and friends accompany tenor Juan Diego Flórez in the charming gondolier’s song ‘La biondina in gondoleta’, feels just right. (Gramophone)