Mahan Esfahani is an intrepid explorer of his instrument’s outer limits with a peerless devotion to extending the harpsichord’s repertoire in our own time.
This stunningly atmospheric programme, in which audience members may move around the church, takes us from Dutch composer Andriessen’s seminal work for harpsichord alone through the young German composer Oscar Jockel’s recent honig.meer.licht to the liquid rippling of Takemitsu’s beautiful Rain Dreaming.
Luc Ferrari’s ‘Programme commun, ‘Musique socialiste?’ (1972) for harpsichord and tape, is an extravaganza that seeks the equality of historic harpsichord and modern electronics. It poses the question: can music be ‘socialist’?
