Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani will release a new recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I on 29 August 2025 on Hyperion Records. This album is part of his long-term project to record all of Bach’s keyboard music and marks the culmination of a relationship with the work spanning thirty years.
Although this is the first time Esfahani has recorded the Well-Tempered Clavier, the music has been central to his life as a musician. He first played parts of it in public as a child in 1993. “I have lived with this music for more than half my life,” he says. “Returning to it as a mature player, with decades of performance and scholarship behind me, has been both a challenge and a homecoming.”
This is not a neutral or academic version of the first half of the “48”. Esfahani sees the collection as full of emotional expression, dramatic shape and human insight. “This is a perfectly crafted piece of theatre,” he explains. “Bach spoke counterpoint fluently to the extent that he clearly felt it was an expressive form sufficient for his thoughts and inner questions about life.”
The recording does not use equal temperament. Instead, Esfahani worked with technician Simon Neal to use a tuning that gives each key its own voice, as Bach would have expected in his time. “It must be said definitively that the title refers to this intelligent and musically sensitive distribution of the scale amongst all twenty-four keys, and not equal temperament,” he says.
Esfahani is the only harpsichordist of his generation to have performed Bach’s complete keyboard works in concert. He gave the full cycle at Wigmore Hall across 24 recitals. That experience shapes his interpretation of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which is both informed by history and clearly personal. In his live performances of the first book, he often repeats the Prelude in C major after the final Fugue in B minor. “Through some ten years of playing Book I as a single recital programme I repeat the C major prelude after the final chord of the B minor fugue dies away, for ‘there be nothing new’.”
The instrument used for the recording was built specially by Huw Saunders. It is based on a German harpsichord from the early eighteenth century—one thought to have belonged to Bach himself—and was made to match Esfahani’s playing style and musical aims. “This instrument has a voice of its own – subtle, responsive, capable of colour and drama. I’ve never played a harpsichord that seems to know what I want to say before I do.”
Esfahani is known for championing the harpsichord and challenging the idea that it belongs only to the past. He was the first harpsichordist to be chosen as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and was also the first to give a solo harpsichord recital at the BBC Proms. His recordings have received awards from Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and Opus Klassik. His repertoire spans the music from Bach and Rameau to Ligeti and the foremost composers of today.
In this new album, Esfahani presents The Well-Tempered Clavier not as a textbook or museum piece, but as music that still speaks to listeners today. His booklet essay explores how the work has been misunderstood over time and places it back in its original context as a set of pieces that reveal the expressive power of every key. He challenges ideas about Bach upheld by Schumann, Chopin and Gounod, and draws on the thoughts of his own teachers such as Zuzana Růžičková. “Every musician has his own ‘48’,” he writes. “This one is mine.”