The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The Spin Doctor took a trip to London on Saturday – there and back, thankfully, before the current heatwave peaked. The reason? Acclaimed harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani was performing Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge as part of his ongoing Bach series at the Wigmore Hall. Almost ten years to the day since he directed the Academy of Ancient Music in an ensemble performance of the same work at the 2012 BBC Proms, Esfahani played the entire work – without an interval – on the harpsichord. The instrument, specially made for him by the Prague-based Jukka Ollikka, modelled on a two-manual harpsichord by Michael Mietke (c.1656/1671–1719), with the addition of a 16' stop à la Pleyel, was the same one Esfahani has used on his widely-praised Hyperion recordings of Bach’s keyboard Toccatas and Partitas.

In the cool atmosphere of a mercifully well air-conditioned Wigmore Hall, this was a performance of epic proportions which drew the listener in immediately. A harpsichord recital, even in a 545-seat hall with legendary acoustics, requires focus and concentration from the audience, ensured on this occasion by Esfahani’s measured start and initially restrained timbres. His changes of registration, not just between but within movements, often resulted in helpful articulative pauses between the formal paragraphs of the larger fugues. Tempi, too, were admirably flexible, a world away from the metronomically strict tactus that used to be the default setting for all Baroque music.

Esfahani came up with a satisfying solution to shaping the movements into a coherent whole (unresolved in both the surviving manuscript and the portfolio-style first printed edition). Performing Bach’s revised version of fourteen Contrapuncti (fugues) and four Canons, he interpolated the canons between groups of contrapuncti. Thus the ‘simple’ fugues of Contrapuncti 1–4 were separated from the counter-fugues of Contrapuncti 5–7 by the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu and the Canon alla Ottava. After Contrapunctus 7, the Canon alla Decima in Contrapunto alla Terza preceded the extraordinary multi-themed fugues of Contrapuncti 8–11 and the hardly less remarkable ‘mirror’ fugues of Contrapuncti 12 and 13, performed in their normal and inverted forms. Finally, the Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta preceded the incomplete Fuga à 3 Soggetti. Pausing between each of these large groupings (often for rehydration) while proceeding with barely a break within them outlined the work’s formal structure more eloquently than could any amount of verbal commentary.

What really marked out this performance as a great one, however, was the sheer sense of involvement in Esfahani’s music-making, ranging from the intensely contemplative to the arrestingly forthright and startlingly breakneck. In music requiring phenomenal virtuosity and command of the music’s various strands, the occasional fluff barely registered. Instead, the listener was swept along by the immensity of the overall conception, as well as the refinement of detail. Esfahani used the upper manual for more delicate passages, moving sometimes subtly, at others deliberately suddenly to a louder registration. The passagework in the canons and Contrapunctus 13 positively flew along – serving as a reminder that the Italian word for fugue, fuga, is derived from the Latin verbs fugere (‘to flee’) and fugare (‘to chase’). This was a performance that balanced the introspective and cerebral with a vibrant sense of motion and expressivity, of action as well as contemplation. The opening of the three-voice Contrapunctus 8 felt like a declaration of intent, a throwing down of the gauntlet, while in the mighty Contrapunctus 11 the different formal sections were clearly differentiated, the third paragraph (beginning at bar 71) taken daringly slow as if to squeeze the maximum expression from the aching harmonic resolutions of its characteristic suspensions. The fourth and final sections, meanwhile, brought rising excitement and tension with their insistent quaver figuration, building to an enormous climax with 16' reinforcement.

The characteristic richness of the final cadences in The Art of Fugue’s revised version was clearly relished, Esfahani frequently reiterating bass pedal notes and even doubling at the lower octave to reinforce the impact of these passages. Extra ornamentation was stylish and frequent yet never over-indulgent. From abstract pensiveness, via turbulent wrestling with dense harmonic and contrapuntal textures, to exuberantly playful high spirits, he brought out the multi-faceted humanity of this mightiest of Bach’s creations, belying its forbidding reputation even while demonstrating its extraordinary technical demands. Perhaps most telling was the almost casual, throw-away manner in which he let the final unfinished fugue – started with such noble expansiveness – die away, earning an appreciative murmur of delight from the audience.

The reception from a not-quite-capacity audience (the concert clashed with the second night of this year’s Proms) was prolonged, enthusiastic and vocal. When it eventually subsided, Esfahani was presented by the Wigmore Hall’s artistic director John Gilhooly with the Wigmore Medal, in recognition of his close ties with the venue, becoming its youngest ever recipient. It is thoroughly deserved, although personally we think this performance alone was worth a medal. Without a hint of ‘dumbing down’, and without the needless distraction of any introductory commentary, this was as vivid a performance as one could hope for of one of the pinnacles of not just Bach’s output but the entire canon of western art music.