Harpsichord Concertos: Martinů, Krása and Kalabis review – Esfahani makes sparks fly as ancient meets modern

You would hear some robust words from Mahan Esfahani if you dared suggest the harpsichord wasn’t an attractive solo instrument for a concerto – but even he will admit that in the 20th century it took a special kind of composer to write one for it. The latest addition to Esfahani’s eclectic discography highlights three of them, all Czech, all grappling in their time with how to make something modern using an instrument so strongly associated with the past. It’s an ear-opening recording.

Bohuslav Martinů’s 1935 Concerto for Harpsichord and Small Orchestra begins in emphatically neoclassical style. Stravinsky springs to mind – yet his brittleness is largely bypassed by Martinů in favour of something softer-edged, playful yet sincere. The orchestra is tiny but there’s a lushness in Martinů’s use of it, and intrigue in the way he compares and contrasts the harpsichord with the ensemble’s piano: the two almost swap roles from where you would expect them to be in a more conventional concerto.

The 1936 work by Hans Krása that follows isn’t conventional, or really a concerto – he called it Kammermusik (“chamber music”) – but it’s still the harpsichordist that is a singular voice against the others, in this case trumpet, cello and bass plus four clarinets. This is a little gem, with a second movement evoking 1930s popular songs – those clarinets swish and swoon through some of the jazzier moments like a close-harmony quartet on a bygone Hollywood soundtrack.

There’s a sense that Martinů and Krása both had fun writing their pieces, whereas the concerto Viktor Kalabis composed in 1975 for his wife, Zuzana Růžičková – Esfahani’s teacher – was something he had to write. This has the scope of a grand piano concerto, and between two expansively driven movements there’s a bleak, wide-open slow one in which time stops. In all three works, Esfahani’s unfussy yet attention-grabbing playing strikes sparks off the musicians of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and their conductor, Alexander Liebreich.

This week’s other pick

Also spotlighting an instrument often left in the background, Sola is a rewarding solo recital of 20th- and 21st-century music from the viola player Rosalind Ventris, who lavishes gorgeously full-bodied playing, weighty yet poised, on music by eight women. Highlights include Elisabeth Lutyens’s Echo of the Wind, Ventris’s viola all swoops and glides, Thea Musgrave’s melancholic In the Still of the Night, and a wonderfully idiomatic 1930 Suite by Imogen Holst, taken out of her usual sidekick/daughter context for once and put deservedly in the spotlight.