Hyperion Records announces Bach: The Complete Keyboard Concertos, a new recording from harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and Britten Sinfonia. 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.