Elizabethan age returns: A skilful, curious harpsichordist delivers another masterful recital.

Harpsichord wizard delivers all that is expected, and plenty more.

And so one of today’s most singular young harpsichordists comes to one of the most singular works ever written for the instrument, JS Bach’s Aria with 30 Variations, aka the Goldberg Variations. The legend, propagated by one of Bach’s great early biographers Forkel, is well-known. In 1741 an insomniac Count von Keyserlingk of Dresden commissions from Bach a work which the Count’s harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, subsequently performs for his master to while away the sleepless hours. Now considered an apocryphal story, it is no less attractive for that. But one thing is true: that in the last century and this one at least, both exponents and listeners of the piano or the harpsichord have spent many an hour in thrall to one of Bach’s most original and grandly conceived work for keyboards. Whether playing Rameau and CPE Bach or Steve Reich and Górecki, the Tehran-born Esfahani always seems to be asking not whether he has something new to say about the music but whether the music has something new to say to him. In other words, a merely novel interpretation isn’t the endgame – though it may be a byproduct. The aria, a stately sarabande that encloses the 30…

Passion, power and penetrating insight inform a gold standard recital.

The award-winning musician explains how he fell in love with his instrument and why he’s on a one-man mission to promote it. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Following his critically acclaimed Rameau and CPE Bach on Hyperion, Mahan Esfahani steps out in style on DG Archiv with this concept album mixing Baroque with Minimalism. I was a little alarmed at his relentless drive through Scarlatti’s La Folia Variations, but the mania is held in check by rigour and discipline. Gorecki’s Harpsichord Concerto is a strangely disturbing piece with its first movement infuriatingly like a broken-record while the second, a baroque mash-up, evokes Jerry Lee Lewis in a powdered wig. Esfahani is in his element in CPE Bach’s La Folia romp and his double tracked version of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase is a tour de force; stunningly accurate with the harpsichord’s pin-point precision helping to delineate the pattern as it shifts in and out of phase. The programme concludes with a magnificent account of Bach’s BWV1052 Concerto performed with intensity and gravitas, as befits a work of abstract intellect allied to sensuous pleasure. Esfahani’s articulation and subtle timing is a wonder, uncovering details that often fly by in the rush.  Concerto Köln fully supports his aesthetic with austere beauty of tone and focused rhythmic point. Their employment of a lute in the continuo makes especial sense in the…