Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has been working his way steadily through JS Bach’s keyboard works for Hyperion and has arrived at one of the great monuments of western music. Like so many players, Esfahani has lived with Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues, the Well-Tempered Clavier, for more than half his life, so that returning to it now, he says, “with decades of performance and scholarship behind me, has been both a challenge and a homecoming’.

Typically, Esfahani comes now to these pieces with his own very personal ideas on how they should be presented and performed – “This is a perfectly crafted piece of theatre,” he has said – and there is a real sense in his performances of each prelude and fugue defining its own dramatic space. The tuning of his harpsichord – a modern copy of an early 18th-century two-manual instrument of a kind that Bach is known to have played – is designed to give a specific colour to each key, for, as Esfahani points out, the “well-tempered” of the work’s title, does not indicate, as so often assumed, a work composed to demonstrate the advantages of equal temperament, but conversely the way in which just tuning may be adapted to suit the demands of each of the major and minor scales.

At the end of the sequence, after the B minor fugue, Esfahani makes a point of repeating the C major prelude, Goldberg-style, to emphasise, he says, how so many of the preludes are variations of the form of the first, “[an] harmonic outline over which a melodic kernel is repeated throughout”. It is one of Esfahani’s more contentious ideas, yet his approach never seems wilful or perverse, and with a few exceptions – to my ears, the C sharp minor fugue does seem unnecessarily lugubrious – his choice of tempi is uncontroversial, his shaping of each movement wonderfully lucid.

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