Fazil Say: Hezarfen – A Bold East West Synthesis

Fazil Say is Turkish, and that simple biographical fact carries more weight than it might seem. Born in Ankara in 1970, trained partly at the Düsseldorf Conservatory and the Robert Schumann Hochschule, he has spent his career navigating the treacherous passage between Western concert tradition and the musical world he grew up hearing — the microtonal inflections, the asymmetrical rhythms, the specific timbres of instruments that predate the Western orchestra by centuries. Most composers who attempt this kind of synthesis end up with something politely bicultural, a souvenir rather than a statement. Hezarfen is neither.

The subject alone is irresistible. Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi was a seventeenth-century Ottoman polymath who, in 1632, strapped on a pair of wings and launched himself from the Galata Tower — flying, according to contemporary accounts, more than two miles across the Bosphorus before landing in Üsküdar. The Sultan, Murad IV, was watching. Impressed, and apparently terrified, he rewarded Hezarfen with a bag of gold and promptly exiled him to Algeria. There are worse fates for a visionary, though exile tends to feel the same in any century.

Say builds the concerto across four movements that trace this story with something approaching naïveté — and I mean that as praise, not condescension. The opening movement, set in Istanbul in 1632, doesn’t ease you in. Percussion erupts immediately, restless and layered, and if you’ve spent any time in Istanbul — the Kapalıçarşı at midday, the ferries, the call to prayer overlapping with traffic and argument — you recognize this density instantly. It isn’t picturesque. It’s accurate.

The ney is the hero here, and it’s worth dwelling on what that means. The instrument — an end-blown reed flute, Persian in origin but central to Ottoman classical and Sufi musical practice — produces a sound unlike anything in the Western woodwind family. Breathy, slightly unstable at the edges, capable of those sliding microtonal inflections that no piano can approximate. Burcu Karadag plays with a quality of concentrated vulnerability, as if the instrument were always on the verge of dissolving into breath. The Galata Tower movement, in which the crowds mock Hezarfen before his leap, uses the ney’s fragility against the percussion’s ridicule with real dramatic intelligence.

Then the flight. Seven and a half minutes, Say tells us — the actual duration of Hezarfen’s crossing. Whether or not you trust the historical claim, the compositional logic is sound. The movement floats, genuinely. The ney line climbs and sustains, the orchestra drops away in texture, and Aykut Köserli’s percussion — including the bendir and the kudüm, instruments whose resonance is earthier and more ancient than anything Mahler ever scored — marks out a pulse that feels less like meter than like a heartbeat at altitude. It’s a remarkable effect, and it’s achieved without any of the New Age vagueness that lesser composers would have reached for.

The final movement, Algerian exile, is the most affecting — and the most unexpected. Say doesn’t resolve Hezarfen’s story triumphantly. The ney turns inward. The harmonics thin. There’s a quality of distance, of something irretrievably lost, that cuts harder than any explicit lamentation would.

A word about context. Turkish composers have been writing orchestral music since the early twentieth century — Ahmed Adnan Saygun, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Necil Kâzım Akses all produced substantial symphonic work that absorbed folk material into Western forms, and CPO and Hungaroton have done useful service in documenting that tradition. But those composers worked largely within Western formal structures, however flavored by local scales and rhythms. Say does something genuinely different here: he builds the concerto’s architecture around the ney and the percussion rather than accommodating them within an existing Western frame. The orchestra serves the soloists, not the other way around.

Dan Ettinger and the Mannheim Nationaltheater Orchestra play as if they mean it — and live rendition, with its particular pressures, tends to reveal whether an orchestra has genuinely absorbed unfamiliar music or is simply executing it. This ensemble has absorbed it. The rhythmic asymmetries, the uneven time signatures, the sudden shifts in density — none of it sounds cautious or approximate. The recorded sound is clear and present without being clinical.

This is Say’s most fully realized work that I know — more immediate in its dramatic logic than the Istanbul Symphony with which it shares the disc. It deserves a place in any serious collection of contemporary concertos, and not just as a curiosity about an unusual instrument. The music earns its keep on purely musical terms. Strongly recommended.