The words “Harpsichord” and “Superstar” are not normally placed next to each other, but Mahan Esfahani comes as close as anyone today to meriting that label: performing in the top venues around the world, teaching, commissioning new work and even new instruments. And perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise, because Esfahani was bitten by the harpsichord bug very, very early.
“I was nine and it was on a cassette tape – remember those? – and I heard Karl Richter with the Munich Bach Orchestra doing Bach Harpsichord Concertos. I couldn't believe that one instrument could make all these sounds, I thought ‘well, it must be four or five instruments’; it was the complexity and the multifarious nature of all the colours of the instrument that really struck me.” When Iona Brown brought the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields to Washington DC to play the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, the ten-year old Esfahani nagged his father mercilessly to take him, that it was essential to go to this concert: “I knew from another cassette tape I had that Brandenburg 5 had a big harpsichord solo. And so I saw a harpsichord on stage, and my heart skipped.”
Years and a progression to musical stardom later, that memory, the wonderment of seeing that instrument for the first time (“it’s kind of like a relationship with a person”), is what Esfahani summons up to get him through a rough patch when he is struggling to find the motivation to practise, together with remembering the difficulty of the days before he was able to own an instrument of his own. “I get up in the morning and say ‘hey, your instrument is just in the room next door, so get in there and practise!”
The environment in which Esfahani grew up did not include any idea of a career in the arts. “For a lot of immigrants, there's a kind of view of ‘we're just trying hard to make it’ and being in the arts doesn't necessarily buy that kind of legitimacy or kind of status that being a doctor does, or an engineer – in that sense, we're very similar to American or British Jews. When you're kind of an outsider, you want to have an indispensable position in society and I respect that and over time, I've gained perspective on it. So the artist's life wasn't for us, but I always knew that I wanted to spend my life with the harpsichord somehow. The way I became a harpsichordist professionally was simply that I wanted to spend the maximum time with the instrument.”
Reviews of Esfahani – which he says he no longer reads – mark him out as a highly individual, somewhat unpredictable performer who throws everything at his music. But I’m unable to draw him into describing any particular intent to play in a specific way. Rather, he is conscious of the passage of time: “We change as people, so we change as musicians too. Actually, the way I play reflects the way I’m feeling at the time. Recently, I was going back to the Johann Gottlieb Goldberg Concerto which I first played in 2008 – it was my debut at Wigmore Hall. Now that I’m coming back to it and studying it – oh man, I used to play it so differently! I was very reserved, I was trying to prove myself, I wouldn’t take risks because of the fear of making a small technical error.” On a recent visit to Nimbus Records at their Wyastone Estate, Esfahani was playing through old CDs and discovered that Shura Cherkassky, one of his favourites, changed totally between his 40s and his 70s, “because he was a different person. And you know, Bach wrote differently. What's really interesting is seeing Bach revise his works later in life, because things become more distilled – they become much more simple. When I did my first recording, of the Emanuel Bach Württemberg Sonatas, I was so conservative about ornamentation. And then right after I did the recording, I found an academic paper about ornamentation of the 6th Sonata and it was really wild: it totally changed my view. Sometimes, you just know better later.”
Esfahani is particularly conscious of the passing of time just now, as a result of the death in September of Zuzana Růžičková, his teacher since 2011 and a major influence. He remarks on Růžičková’s fearlessness, on how she always got to the bottom of a piece of music, how she always put in “that last 5%”, how – in spite of being a concentration camp survivor – she considered music to be a matter of life and death. She held a strong belief in some form of Platonic ideal of Bach’s music, the performer’s task being to search through the leaves and the branches to find that ideal. It’s a strongly different performance philosophy, he argues, to believe that the composer had a purpose in every note and that the performer should try to find that purpose, from the approach that “this is how they did this kind of phrase in that period, so this is how you should play it”. That’s a cynical way to solve interpretive problems, contrasting with Růžičková’s view, much in the vein of Talmudic enquiry, that an interpretive problem is not ultimately solvable: you can get close to it but you will never fully solve the problem. “That’s why Christians have heaven and hell, and Jews don’t have that!”