A rare and overstuffed harpsichord recital
Esfahani’s recital turned out to be a blend of probing and often luxuriant playing, beset by a host of ill-considered notions about how to frame a solo performance.
The appeal of Esfahani’s programming choices, which ranged from music by the Renaissance master William Byrd to works of Lou Harrison and Steve Reich, soon paled as it became clear that he’d assembled a semi-random collection of pieces with no relationship to one another.
A program billed to go 75 minutes without intermission wound up rambling on for more than two hours, thanks to overstuffed repertoire choices and the woolly philosophizing and self-regarding anecdotes that punctuated the evening.
Elsewhere on the program, Esfahani found lush expressivity in the coiling melodic figures of Toru Takemitsu’s all-too-brief “Rain Dreaming,” and made nice work of the harmonic strangenesses embedded in Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s far-too-long Sonata in D. “Le Jardin Secret II” by Kaija Saariaho combined fragmentary gestures from the keyboard with taped sounds that included some putatively shocking female gasps.
Alternatively, it may be that they were uninterested in a reading whose awkward balances between the live instrument and the pre-recorded track precluded any of the composer’s intricate phasing effect from fully registering.