Keyboardist
Mahan Esfahani
makes personal, highly distinctive
Bach
recordings that open
's works up, with emphasis placed on various details and rhetorical points in the music. His notes, opinionated even in the footnotes but always informative and oriented toward historical detail, are matched by interpretations that have a good deal of flair even as they embody historical performance points. Here, following on his recording of the
Anna Magdalena Bach Book
,
Esfahani
offers further pieces mostly intended for the tuition of
's son
Wilhelm Friedemann
, centered on the sets variously known as the
Two-
and
Three-Part Inventions
or
Inventions
Sinfonias
. There are also sets of Preludes, short but intensely intricate.
offers individualistic interpretations and a few fragments and oddities like the
Applicatio in C major, BWV 994
; these, too, were teaching pieces. Unlike the
Anna Magdalena
pieces, these are not particularly simple; the
call for a good deal of virtuosity.
plays these on a harpsichord based on one by
Michael Mietke
, a builder of
's time who made the instrument for which the
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050
, was composed, and it has a brilliant sound indeed. The smaller pieces are mostly given to a clavichord, something that remains uncommon in
even though he manifestly used this instrument often in domestic situations.
has various thoughts on the deployments of the instruments, although he freely admits that it may depend on his mood at any given time. At any rate, each piece is worked out in great detail while retaining a high degree of expressivity, and the recording as a whole, as usual, is a joy. This album made classical best-seller lists in the late summer of 2024. ~ James Manheim