Mahan Esfahani
Praised by The Times as ‘exceptionally gifted’ and by Early Music Today for his ‘sensitivity and vibrance,’ the Iranian-born Mahan Esfahani (b. 1984) is quickly establishing himself as the leading concert harpsichordist of his generation. He was the first harpsichordist to be named a BBC New Generation Artist and to be awarded a fellowship prize by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Recent highlights have included performances of of Kalabis’ Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra (1975) with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Martinu’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra (1935) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek, and Poulenc’s Concert Champetre (1928) with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Last season, he also gave his solo debut at the Wigmore Hall (broadcast on BBC Radio 3) – about which the Daily Telegraph exclaimed ”the harpsichord comes out of hiding…magnificent” – and appeared at the City of London and York Early Music Festivals. In addition, his recording of the Poulenc concert was selected as a CD of the month for the May 2010 issue of BBC Music Magazine, and he has been featured as a “Hot Property” by Classic FM magazine.
Further highlights of the upcoming season include a May 2011 appearance at the Wigmore Hall with the countertenor James Bowman, and directing the Manchester Camerata, the Arion Baroque Orchestra (Montreal), and The English Concert at the 2011 Lufthansa Festival. Further afield, he will return to the United States for solo recitals and make his concerto debut in the Far East with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra in March 2011.
As a soloist and guest director Esfahani has appeared with The English Concert, the Manchester Camerata, and the Seattle Baroque Orchestra; His series and festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Tage Alter Musik Regensburg, the Goettingen Handel Festival, the Settimana Mozart of Milan, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Early Music Society.
Esfahani studied as a President’s Scholar at Stanford University where his principal mentor was the musicologist George Houle; he went on to pursue his performance studies under the supervision of the Australian harpsichordist Peter Watchorn (Boston) and the Italian organist Lorenzo Ghielmi (Milan) before settling in the United Kingdom in as Artist-in-Residence at New College, Oxford. In the autumn of 2010 he was further elected an honourary member of Keble College, Oxford.
Program
Thursday June 30 - Evening Harpsichord Recital - Montisi
21:00 - S.S. Annunziata
Mahan Esfahani
J.S.Bach, Variazioni Goldberg
Aria with Thirty Variations for a harpsichord with two manuals, comprising Part IV of the collection 'Keyboard-Practise' by Johann Sebastian Bach, Royal Polish and Saxon Court-Composer, Capellmeister and Directore chori musici of Leipzig. Known as the 'Goldberg' Variations
ARIA.
Variation 1.
Variation 2.
Variation 3. Canone all'unisono.
Variation 4.
Variation 5.
Variation 6. Canone alla seconda.
Variation 7. al tempo di Giga.
Variation 8.
Variation 9. Canon alla terza.
Variation 10. Fughetta.
Variation 11.
Variation 12. Canone all quarta.
Variation 13.
Variation 14.
Variation 15. Canone alla quinta.
INTERVAL
Variation 16. Ouvertüre.
Variation 17.
Variation 18. Canon alla sesta.
Variation 19.
Variation 20.
Variation 21. Canone alla settima.
Variation 22. Alla breve.
Variation 23.
Variation 24. Canone all'ottava.
Variation 25.
Variation 26.
Variation 27. Canon alla nona.
Variation 28.
Variation 29. Quodlibet
Variation 30
ARIA da capo.
• Tickets at the door 10.-, 25.- €
A Few Remarks.
''Count Kayserling, formerly Russian Ambassador at the Court of the Elector of Saxony, who frequently resided in Leipzig…once said to 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 fulfill 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 melomane 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'' (Gemüths-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 Mühlhausen 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 Forkel, who had extensive interviews with the Bach sons, Bach family members would meet and sing quodlibets and ''laugh heartily.'' 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 (a not uncommon event in our own time!), 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 = 3x3, 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. Can we hear them singing? 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.
Academically, there is no proof of this narrative intent but, in my mind at least, 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
Oxford, September 2010.
website: http://www.mahanesfahani.com
blog: http://www.mahanesfahani.com/blog/
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