The next instalment of Mahan Esfahani’s highly regarded survey of the composer’s keyboard works delivers Book 1 of Bach’s The well-tempered Clavier. Those qualities which reviewers have praised throughout the series—‘daredevil spontaneity’ (Prospect), ‘absolute mastery’ (Gramophone) and a ‘fearless improvisatory approach’ (BBC Record Review)—remain very much in evidence in this compelling account of one of the peaks of the repertoire. With the bonus of essays from the instrument maker and the harpsichord technician, as well as Mahan’s own extensive booklet note—in which he discusses the performing, instrumental and scholarly histories of the ‘48’ over the course of the intervening three hundred years—September’s Record of the Month again confirms the truth of BBC Record Review’s claim that ‘Mahan Esfahani couldn’t make a routine recital of Bach’s keyboard music if you paid him to’.

‘Unique in its terrible magnificence, gloomy and bleak, as if one were walking among dark tombs’ was the awe-struck reaction of a nineteenth-century music historian to the Requiem Mass recorded here by the all-male adult voices of De Profundis in Cristóbal de Morales’s Requiem a 5 & Officium defunctorum. Coupled with Morales’s music for the Office for the Dead, it still packs as great an emotional punch today as it must have done in the mid-sixteenth century. This album is the second in a series of twelve that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats; Eamonn Dougan conducts.