Wigmore Hall
Clavier-Büchlein
für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach:
Nine Little Preludes, BWV 924-932
Toccata in E minor, BWV 914
Toccata in D minor, BWV 913
Capriccio
on the Departure of his Most Beloved Brother, BWV 992
Clavier-Büchlein
für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach:
Five Little Preludes, BWV 939-943
English Suite no.6 in D minor,
BWV 911
Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)
Mahan Esfahani opened my ears –
and mind – not only to Bach on the harpsichord, but to the instrument itself.
With this Wigmore Hall recital, he continued to do so. It was certainly not that
I had ever thought Bach that ‘must’ be performed on the piano; that would be as
absurd as saying that it must be performed on any other instrument(s). (Not
that that prevents many from making such an absurd claim.) However, with a few
exceptions, such as recordings from Wanda Landowska and Ralph Kirkpatrick, I
had heard few interesting performances: performances that treated the music in
anything more than naïve archaeological fashion. If you are neither able nor
willing to hear the Schoenberg in Bach, just as much as the Bach in Schoenberg,
then you might as well give up. If only the sectarian ayatollahs of ‘authenticity’
would – or indeed those who present an image founded upon silly hairstyles and
other carefully manufactured ‘quirks’. Esfahani, however, with his insistence
on the harpsichord as a living instrument, at home in Xenakis as Bach, in Ligeti
as Byrd, shows us not that the choice of instrument is irrelevant; of course it
is not. Esfahani shows us, as he did once again here, that he is a musician
worthy of the supreme challenges with which Bach confronts him – and us.
Nine Little Preludes from the Clavier-Büchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
made for a wonderful overture: not unlike, perhaps, a selection from Boulez’s Notations, for another instrument (about
which I shall now shut up). There was a sense less of a conspectus, of a summa – this is not the 48 – but of new paths opening up: not
least in the ninth, left incomplete in work and performance, the break theatrical
in the best sense, a curtain-raiser rather than something applied from outside.
Esfahani played these little pieces as a set, tonal progression again emerging
from within: a sign of freedom, not a straitjacket. This is not the age of the Classical
sonata, but of the suite (all or mostly ‘in’ a single key): progression means
something different here. It means something nevertheless, and holds
implications both historical and musical.
Landowska’s style and indeed
that of Willem Mengelberg came to mind in the E minor Toccata. I say ‘style’,
but really I mean ‘spirit’ – not that one can or should dissociate style and
idea, as Schoenberg would warn us. This, I felt, was a performance I should
like to have given, if only I had the technical and indeed musical facility to
do so. Esfahani revelled in the young Bach’s music, never trying to turn it
into older Bach; why should he? Percussive moments seemed almost to suggest
Scarlatti; indeed, there was more than a little of the Mediterranean, or rather
a German’s longing for the Mediterranean, to the performance. Perhaps I am
sentimentalising, or applying my own preoccupations to what I heard. This was a
performance open to personalisation, though – in the best sense. And Bach
sounded, quite rightly, at least as radical as Ligeti. A bravura performance of
the D minor Toccata followed. Following a slightly improvisatory opening, it
teased and charmed; the performance compelled the music to speak, not unlike a recitativo accompagnato. This was Bach
as generative as Beethoven or Brahms, albeit in somewhat different ways. It was
anything but austere, the dialectic between freedom and organisation as
spellbinding as it would be in any later composer, Schoenberg included.
Registration choices truly rang
the changes – musical changes, no mere ‘effects’ – in a performance of the Capriccio on the Departure of his Most
Beloved Brother that permitted of many standpoints or, perhaps better, ways
in. Roots in earlier music came to life: living traditions in themselves. Chromaticism
grew out of simple, diatonic beginnings. Something Italianate or at least ‘southern’
– Scarlatti again a kinsman? – sang in the exultation of homecoming. But it was
Bach, and only Bach, who spoke, sang, and told of the glory of God in the
fugue. Old ‘debates’ about programme music refuse to die, at least in the
popular imagination; surely such music and performances ought to kill them off
forever. It is never either/or.
Five further Preludes, BWV
939-43, opened the second half, Esfahani beginning very much in medias res. They sounded – regardless of questions concerned
their ‘authenticity’ – as jewels in a Webern-like suite. Whoever wrote them,
their quality spoke for itself; as, at least in performance, did their diversity
in unity.
A Prelude in every sense opened
the Sixth English Suite. We heard, experienced a youthful, exhilirating
representation of chaos: something I fancied both Landowska and Alfred Cortot
would have appreciated. The Allemande and Courante seemed almost to function as
secular(ish) – not that the distinction between sacred and secular is remotely
meaningful for Bach, or indeed at all – versicle and response. Redemption
seemed almost at hand, if not through our own works. The intrinsic grandeur of
the Sarabande and its Double was released in a fashion that seemed haunted by
an earlier ‘Englishness’: Purcell, perhaps, or Lawes. My expectations were
confounded – in a good way – in the Gavottes, taken at quite a lick and all the
better for it. Interplay between hands told a story just as it would in
Liszt or Webern. The Gigue danced in, not despite, its almost Bergian density.
And then, a surprise: a Fantasy in C minor, written apparently when Bach was only
fifteen years old. I was delighted to make its acquaintance. As ever with Bach,
it looked backward and forward, those long, profound glances in mutual service.
That, surely, should be how we strive to understand his music too; such was
certainly the case here.
