Add source Login
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 album review – Mahan Esfahani’s reading is lucid and illuminating

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 album review – Mahan Esfahani’s reading is lucid and illuminating

(Hyperion) The harpsichordist describes Bach’s Preludes and Fugues as a ‘challenge and a homecoming’. His thoughtful new recording has a sense of the work’s drama but is never wilful nor perverse Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has been working his way steadily through JS Bach’s keyboard works for Hyperion and has arrived at one of the great monuments of western music. Like so many players, Esfahani has lived with Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues, the Well-Tempered Clavier, for more than half his life, so that returning to it now, he says, “with decades of performance and scholarship behind me, has been both a challenge and a homecoming’. Typically, Esfahani comes now to these pieces with his own very personal ideas on how they should be presented and performed – “This is a perfectly crafted piece of theatre,” he has said – and there is a real sense in his performances of each prelude and fugue defining its own dramatic space. The tuning of his harpsichord – a modern copy of an early 18th-century two-manual instrument of a kind that Bach is known to have played – is designed to give a specific colour to each key, for, as Esfahani points out, the “well-tempered” of the work’s title, does not indicate, as so often assumed, a work composed to demonstrate the advantages of equal temperament, but conversely the way in which just tuning may be adapted to suit the demands of each of the major and minor scales. Continue reading...