Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Andrew Villa Harpschordist Mahan Esfahani performed Saturday, Feb. 10

Media Credit: Andrew Villa Kevin Flyer tunes the Harpsichord between performances at the Early Music Concert Feb.10, 2007. Flyer is the owner of the harpschord that Esfahani used during his performance at Las Positas

Media Credit: Andrew Villa kevin Fryer interviews Esfahani for for the first half hour of the concert, Feb. 10, 2007

By Helen Cunningham
Staff Writer

If you didn't go to the Early Music Concert on Feb. 10. You missed a heady night. The concert was held, appropriately, in the Las Positas College library. Before the concert began, I caught the performer peeking through the book stacks at the small audience.
The concert felt a little bit like that the whole time, because the music's history was as much a part of concert as the harpsichord was. This was mostly because of Esfahani. "Sometimes I feel like an impostor as a performer," said Esfahani. A Standford President Scholar, commented, "I was really more interested in how the music fit its history."
That made the concert different than many classical performances. Instead of playing each piece in succession, Esfahani stopped to explain the music before playing it. I learned about the religious climate in Elizabethan England before a piece by John Bull and some of Johann Sebastian Bach's family history.
Esfahani played a snippet of the last piece, written by Bach when his brother left for the army. "This is a Bach's brother's friend begging him not to leave. They're saying, 'don't go, don't go,'" Esfahani explained. He then added another few notes, compounding onto what he had already played. "And this is the brother's footsteps, as he, literally, leaves." Esfahani smiled. "It's kind of a cheap trick."
The remarkable thing about the campus concert was that there were so few students in attendance. The performer and I, both in our early twenties, were some of the youngest people there.
Marlyn Marquis, who helped to organize the concert series, wasn't surprised. "These concerts appeal to a certain type of person, mostly with discretionary income and discretionary time."
A community education class before each concert was part of an effort to reach out to a broader section of the community, but Saturday's crowd wasn't diverse. I asked Marquis what else she was doing to encourage younger people to come. "The classes were part of that strategy," she said, asking me, "Do you have any ideas?"

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