Mahan Esfahani, Wigmore Hall review - shimmering poise and radical brilliance

To watch Mahan Esfahani play the harpsichord is to watch a philosopher at work. While there’s often playfulness and shimmering levity you can feel the thought behind each note. The Iranian-American’s passion for the harpsichord began when he was nine – the moment he heard it on a cassette his uncle gave to him when he was visiting Iran, he knew he wanted to spend his life devoted to the instrument.

In a Guardian interview he once described it as the “posh, pretty boy in prison. He’s gonna get beaten on” – a witty yet defensive quote that accounts for an approach that’s as radical as it’s invigorating.

In his performance of three of Handel’s Great Suites for harpsichord and two works by Georg Böhm, he meticulously excavated every nuance from pieces that were as technically demanding as they were emotionally discrete. It was little surprise that at the end of each suite, he briefly slumped against the back of his chair as if he had given his all.

The first piece of the evening was Handel’s Suite No 2 in F, beginning with its urbane, stylised Adagio. Esfahani steadily maintained the quaver beat in the left hand, while allowing the right hand to trace the brilliant ornamentation so that it dazzled like a butterfly in sunlight. The Allegro was dispatched with joyous efficiency, before the second Adagio introduce a chordal solemnity and exquisite clashing harmonies. The final Allegro Fugue was like an intense debate between the two hands, becoming increasingly expansive as it drove towards the resonant conclusion.

The mood of the evening changed as he embarked on Georg Böhm’s thrillingly intense Prelude, Fugue and Postlude in G minor. For the opening movement, the left hand menacingly repeated a low G as the right hand built chords above it as if they were pillars. In another century, Böhm might have written scores for horror movies – here you sense his determination to create music that goes more than skin deep.  For the ensuing Adagio, the notes unfurled with the delicacy of a cobweb before the poised rationality of the Fugue. Then a waterfall of arpeggios marked the Postlude until a procession of chords solemnly ushered us to the sweetness of the G major ending.The joyful Capriccio sounded as if it was built around a children’s song, becoming more and more elaborately joyful as it progressed. After this we were back to Handel, whose Suite No 3 in D minor opened with a glittering cadenza-like Prelude. Esfahani brought a brusque and busy exactness to the Fugue, before displaying his more lyrical yearning side in the supple and poetic Allemande. A galloping Courante took us to the virtuosic Air and Variations, in which a stately chorale-style passage was succeeded by cosmopolitan elegance and crystalline ornamentation.

Esfahani dispatched the remaining variations with vigour, not least the buoyant 12/8 section. He finished off with the crisply emphatic Presto, a tour de force in which you could imagine the best and brightest of eighteenth-century London dancing their hearts out.

During the interval a huddled crowd tentatively approached the stage to examine the striking beast of a harpsichord that Esfahani had specially designed in 2018. Made by the Prague-based Finnish harpsichord maker, Julika Ollikka, it is based on a model made by Michael Mietke – who was highly admired by Bach. The key difference to anything that Bach would have known is that the soundboard is made of fibreglass rather than wood. Certainly, in the concert, it had a resonance that rivals that of most existing harpsichords – often at the end of the piece we found ourselves hypnotised by the reverberations from the final chords.

For the final part of the evening Esfahani played Handel’s Suite No 7 in G minor followed by a Minuet from his Suite in B flat. After the thrilling, stately opening we suddenly found ourselves caught up in a dance, the wild, dotted rhythms bringing an air of gleeful subversion. Then the mood became more meditative – achingly elegiac until a fizzingly energetic Allegro swept all reflection away. Throughout the suite Esfahani displayed a rich palate of emotions – alternately plunging us into deep hued melancholy or spinning us ecstatically to the stars. At the thunderous final chords the crowd erupted with cries of “Bravo”. It was a fitting finish to a fascinating, often exhilarating evening in which the harpsichord proved again and again that it was so much more than a pretty face.

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