Say: Hezarfen Concerto – The Flight in Sound

A man straps on wings and jumps off a tower — and lands, alive, two miles away. That is not legend embroidered by centuries of storytelling. That, apparently, is history, or close enough to it, and Fazil Say has taken it as the scaffolding for one of the more original concertos to cross my desk in years.

The instrument at the center of Hezarfen is the ney, that breathy, reedy column of cane the Sufis use to represent the soul’s longing for God — Rumi wrote of it, famously, as a thing “cut from the reedbed,” crying because it has been severed from its origin. Say does not treat it as an exotic guest soloist parachuted into a European orchestra for novelty’s sake. He builds an entire dramaturgy around its particular vocabulary — its microtonal bends, its breathy attack, the way a good player can make the instrument seem to inhale as much as exhale. Burcu Karadag does exactly that. Her tone in the upper register has an almost vocal rasp to it, unpolished in the best sense, and there were moments — particularly in the long unaccompanied paragraphs of the slow music — where I forgot I was listening to a wind instrument at all and thought instead of a human throat.

The story is Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi’s, and Say tells it in four blunt, almost cinematic panels. “Istanbul 1632” opens with percussion that genuinely does conjure a waterfront city at first light — the clatter of a bazaar, boats, gulls, argument. Aykut Köserli’s battery of kudüm, bendir, and (a lovely touch, this) waterphone gives the movement a tactile, unglamorous physicality; you can practically smell the brine. “Galata Tower” turns uglier, crowd noise rendered in jagged cross-rhythms, the strings needling at odd metric groupings — 7s and 9s and worse — that Dan Ettinger and the Mannheim orchestra negotiate with more ease than I expected from a house band better known, presumably, for Verdi and Wagner on a Tuesday night.

Then the flight itself. Seven and a half minutes, exactly the length — so Say tells us — of Hezarfen’s actual glide across the Bosphorus. It is the finest music on the disc. The ney climbs and hovers over a harmonic bed that barely moves, sustained string chords with almost no vibrato, and the effect is genuinely of suspension, of held breath. I don’t know that I believe every programmatic claim a composer makes about his own timings — these things acquire a certain mythology in the telling — but the music does not need the justification. It simply floats, beautifully, and then the “Algerian Exile” finale lets the air out slowly, ney lines turning inward, percussion retreating to a whisper, ending not in triumph but in something closer to resignation.

Turkish composers writing in Western forms are hardly a new phenomenon — Saygun, Erkin, Akses did the groundwork decades ago, folding modal inflections and asymmetric dance rhythms into symphonies and concertos that owed as much to Bartók’s example as to Anatolian folk practice. What none of them did, so far as the historical record shows, was hand a solo concerto to an actual Ottoman instrument and ask a full modern orchestra to accommodate its tuning, its breath, its whole alien logic. Say has done that. Whether it constitutes a “first” in the strictest musicological sense I’ll leave to specialists with more patience for such claims than I have; what matters is that it works, and works without condescension toward either tradition.

The interpretation is a live one, and you can hear it — coughs, the occasional scrape of a chair, an audience holding its nerve through the silences of the flight movement rather better than most Symphony Hall crowds manage during a Mahler adagio. The engineering captures Karadag’s instrument with real presence, never spotlit artificially above the orchestral texture, and Ettinger paces the four panels as a continuous narrative rather than four separate showpieces strung together, which is exactly right.

Say’s Istanbul Symphony, the larger work sharing this release, deserves its own extended notice and I won’t shortchange it here with a paragraph. Suffice to say the same appetite for color and rhythmic tang animates it, on a bigger canvas, with results that are sometimes thrilling and occasionally, to these ears, a touch overstuffed — Say’s imagination runs faster than his editing pencil.

But Hezarfen is the discovery here, a small, strange, wholly convincing piece that deserves a place alongside the handful of other cross-cultural concertos — Kancheli’s viola works, say, or Ravi Shankar’s sitar concertos with André Previn — that manage to honor two traditions without diminishing either. Nobody else has written anything quite like it. Nobody else, probably, could have.