BACH’S COFFEE HOUSE CONCERTOS: MUSIC FOR A NEW PUBLIC
MAHAN ESFAHANI AND BRITTEN SINFONIA RECORD THE COMPLETE KEYBOARD CONCERTOS
- A modern performance perspective: One player per part on modern instruments, “liberating the harpsichord from antiquity”.
- Bach “virtually invented” the keyboard concerto: Transforming the keyboard from continuo instrument into a solo voice in dialogue with the ensemble.
- An “outward-facing, public” Bach: Written for Leipzig’s coffee house concerts and a new audience beyond church and court.
- A new reconstruction (BWV1059): Esfahani completes Bach’s unfinished concerto.
Single 1 out today: Bach: Keyboard Concerto No 3 in D major, BWV1054 – 3: Allegro https://hyperion.lnk.to/CDA68481-2_ig1
Hyperion Records announces Bach: The Complete Keyboard Concertos, a new recording from harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and Britten Sinfonia, released on 12 June 2026. The album forms part of Esfahani’s long-term project to record Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete keyboard music and follows his acclaimed 2025 release of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I.
Recorded with Esfahani directing from the harpsichord, the album brings together Bach’s eight keyboard concertos alongside the Triple Concerto in A minor BWV1044.
At the centre of this recording is the instrument itself. Esfahani performs on a harpsichord co-designed with the builder Jukka Ollikka in Prague, conceived not as a historical reconstruction but as a modern instrument in every respect. It reflects his approach to the harpsichord as grounded in present-day musical practice, and its use here naturally leads to performances with one player to a part on modern instruments.
The recording brings together Esfahani and Britten Sinfonia, long-standing collaborators who have explored this repertoire together in concert, including a complete cycle at Wigmore Hall. In Esfahani’s view, such forces can “liberate the harpsichord from antiquity” and bring the music into a more immediate and contemporary sound world.
Bach’s keyboard concertos mark a decisive moment in the history of instrumental music. As Mahan Esfahani explains, these are works “which Bach virtually invented as a genre”, transforming the keyboard from a continuo instrument into a virtuosic solo voice in direct dialogue with the ensemble.
Written during Bach’s Leipzig years for performances with the collegium musicum at Zimmermann’s coffee house, the concertos reflect a composer fully engaged with the musical and social currents of his time. These were not works for church or court, but for a lively public setting in which Bach and his colleagues performed alongside music by other contemporary composers, responding to fashionable tastes and a broader audience . Far from being inward-looking, they represent what Esfahani describes as an “outward-facing, ‘public’ manifestation” of Bach’s artistic personality. In this context, the elevation of the harpsichord from accompaniment to solo instrument was not only a musical development but, as he notes, “a socially provocative act”, shaped by a new public concert culture and an emerging educated middle-class audience.
The recording also includes Esfahani’s reconstruction of Bach’s unfinished Concerto in D minor BWV1059. Bach left only eight bars of orchestral introduction before breaking off the manuscript. Drawing on Bach’s own practice of reworking earlier material, Esfahani completes the fragment as a three-movement concerto using music from related cantatas.
Mahan Esfahani appears in several major European concerts in 2026, including a return to London’s Wigmore Hall and performances at the Bachfest Leipzig, where he is Artist-in-Residence.
Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg – 17 April 2026
Solo recital, of all new works.
Hans Werner Henze
Six Absences for Harpsichord (1961)
Bavarian State Opera, Munich – May and June 2026
A cast member for Brett Dean’s new opera at the Bayerische Statsoper, “Of One Blood” under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski.
Wigmore Hall, London – 18 May 2026
Esfahani returns to Wigmore Hall for a solo harpsichord recital. His programme explores lines of influence across the Baroque, bringing together Girolamo Frescobaldi’s improvisatory toccatas and canzoni, Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, and works by João de Sousa Carvalho.
Bachfest Leipzig – June 2026
As Artist-in-Residence at the Bachfest Leipzig, Esfahani appears in a series of concerts across the festival, performing a wide-ranging repertoire centred on Bach and his musical world in Leipzig.
More information:
Booklet notes here
Biography:
Since making his debut in London in 2009, Mahan Esfahani has made it his life’s mission to re-establish the harpsichord in the mainstream of concert instruments. To that end, he is the first harpsichordist in a generation to be active in virtually all areas of music-making from large completist projects of earlier composers to commissioning over twenty new solo and concertante works for the harpsichord. His extensive work in performing modern and new concertos for the harpsichord — from the earlier pioneering works of Falla (1926), Martinů (1935), Gerhard (1956) to new ones by Coll (2017), Ruders (2021), Srnka (2023), Bryars (2023), et al. — has seen him as a soloist partnering with the leading conductors of the day: François-Xavier Roth, Ilan Volkov, Ludovic Morlot, Leif Segerstam, Andrew Manze, Joshua Weilerstein, Jiří Bělohlavek, Yalda Zamani, Andris Poga, Ken-David Masur, Thierry Fischer….
With recitals of the entire range of old and new harpsichord literature at London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Wiener Musikverein, Klavier Festival Ruhr the Edinburgh International Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the BBC Proms, the Walt Disney Hall of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Madrid’s Fundacion March, L’Auditori Barcelona, Zürich’s Tonhalle, and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Esfahani has taken the harpsichord beyond the realm of the esoteric into a new area of appreciation from all angles of concert life. His work with new music has extended to collaborations with leading and emerging composers of the day: Gavin Bryars, Miroslav Srnka, Kaija Saariaho, Brett Dean, Poul Ruders, Daniel Kidane, Laurence Osborn, Francisco Coll, Anahita Abbasi, Atsuhiko Gondai, Marcus Rock, Nilufar Habibian, to name a few.
The 2025-26 season sees a number of important milestones in Esfahani’s work that demonstrate the broad range of his interests. As the artist-in-residence of the 2026 Leipzig BachFest, he demonstrates his dedication to the work of J.S. Bach — the entirety of whose keyboard output he is currently recording to significant critical acclaim for Hyperion Records — whilst concurrently performing in a new onstage role written especially for him in Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood at the Bayerische Statsoper in Munich under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski. This season alone sees a variety of new commissions including an ensemble piece by Calliope Tsoupaki for Esfahani and the Nederlandse Bachvereniging, a new concerto by Julian Grant, a new solo work by Nilufar Habibian for the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and a commission by Alberto Carretero as part of a programme of four modern Spanish harpsichord concertos for the Festival Internacional de Musica de Granada.
Meanwhile, he is presenting a three-concert series on the work of Domenico Scarlatti at London’s Wigmore Hall, returns to New York’s Frick Gallery with Bach’s Art of Fugue, records concertos by Gavin Bryars, Gary Carpenter, and Caroline Shaw with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and has a guest curatorship of modern chamber music and the entirety of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier at the Czech Philharmonic.
Esfahani’s extensive discography — in addition to the ongoing complete series of Bach’s keyboard works for Hyperion/Universal — includes an album of 20th-century Czech harpsichord concertos for Hyperion that won a 2023 Opus Klassik in Berlin, sonata by CPE Bach (Gramophone Award 2014), the complete keyboard pieces of Jean-Philippe Rameau (New York Times Best Recordings 2014), and the album Musique? of modern electroacoustic works for harpsichord (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik quarterly list 2021). Recording collaborations include the Brandenburg Project on BIS with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Dausgaard, Dutilleux’s Les Citations with the Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot, and four albums with Michala Petri — a collaboration particularly close to his heart. The totality of these activities is attested by extensive features on his work in The New York Times, Gramophone, De Volkskrant, and a variety of music industry and culture publications. In 2022 he was awarded the Wigmore Hall Prize.
Following studies in musicology and history at Stanford University, Mahan Esfahani studied privately with Peter Watchorn in Boston before completing his formation as the last student of the celebrated Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková. Following a period as artist-in-residence at New College (Oxford) he continues his non-musical activities as a guest instructor in various international courses and as a frequent cultural commentator for such publications as The New Yorker, The Critic, and Engelsberg Ideas. Born in Tehran and raised in the United States, he went on to live in Milan, Oxford, and London before finally making his home the past decade in Prague.