Mahan Esfahani

Mahan Esfahani – Martinů, Krása & Kalabis: Harpsichord Concertos (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 25, 2023 · Comments off

Mahan Esfahani’s first concerto album for Hyperion is everything the listener could wish for: definitive performances of three marvellous—and unexpected—works by three of the last century’s Czech masters.

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Michala Petri, Hille Perl, Mahan Esfahani – Corellimania (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 10, 2023 · Comments off

“As the progenitor of a style whose inﬂuence more or less came to deﬁne the in- strumental music of the High Baroque, Arcangelo Corelli (1653 – 1713) occupies a position in music history as unenviable as it is to his great credit. Just what made Corelli’s style seem strikingly novel to his contemporaries is a tricky question. To be sure, his standardization and popularization of certain formal tropes – most notably the succession of movement types in Sonate da Camera and Sonate da Chiesa – was a signiﬁcant part of what his followers considered the ‘Corellian’ manner. But Corelli’s actual compositional style, his way of organizing musical thoughts into phrases and motives, is fundamentally derived from the expressive capabilities of his chosen instrument, the violin. Certain melodic patterns used to modulate and to effect sequences (e.g., chains of sevenths and ﬁfths) basically derive from speciﬁcities of violin technique that amplify an instrument with origins primarily in dance music into one that in Corelli’s hands, could imitate the rise and fall of the sung and spoken human voice. This tension between idiomatically in- strumental techniques and the evocation of the voice is the deﬁning characteristic of Corelli’s style throughout all his surviving works and would establish the “Roman School” as the supreme measure of musical taste for generations.

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Mahan Esfahani – Bach: The French Suites (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 8, 2023 · Comments off

‘Mahan Esfahani couldn’t make a routine recital of Bach’s keyboard music if you paid him’ was BBC Record Review’s verdict on a previous release: prospective listeners to this wonderful new set should rest assured that any hint of the routine remains as distant a threat as ever.

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Mahan Esfahani – Bach: Italian Concerto, French Overture, 4 Duets, Capriccios (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 12, 2023 · Comments off

Mahan Esfahani again highlights the radicalism, virtuosity—and sheer joyousness—of the works recorded here, both in his playing and in his uncommonly engaging booklet notes.

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Mahan Esfahani – Rameau: Pièces de clavecin (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 16, 2023 · Comments off

Gramophone-Award-winning harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has recorded Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin in the historic setting of the Music Room at Hatchlands Park in Surrey. This is a masterclass for the instrument, confirming this young artist as a truly great player: in the words of International Record Review ‘his technique is beyond criticism and his inherent musicianship goes far deeper than mere surface understanding … it is difficult not to warm to such a musician’.

This double album comprises the whole of Rameau’s output of keyboard suites, and Esfahani rejoices in its wealth of genius, its excitement and drama. Rameau is a composer whose revival is ongoing, and his unique combination of the witty and the cerebral, the light and the curmudgeonly, abounds throughout his harpsichord music.

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Mahan Esfahani, Carolyn Sampson – Bach: Notebooks for Anna Magdalena (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 20, 2023 · Comments off

Domestic music-making of a distinctly superior sort is lovingly recreated in a rare recording of the notebooks Bach presented to his second wife.

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Mahan Esfahani, Concerto Köln – Mahan Esfahani: Time Present and Time Past (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 9, 2023 · Comments off

Mahan Esfahani’s new album“Time Present and Time Past” is an eclectic programme fusing Baroque with Minimalism – and the first harpsichord album DG has released in over 30 years!

Gramophone Award winner Mahan explores the relationship between two musical genres which are 300 years apart, yet emphasizing its similarities by playing all pieces on period instruments – which has never been done before with the Reich and Gorecki pieces.

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Mahan Esfahani – The Passinge mesures (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 9, 2023 · Comments off

This sensational recital—featuring some of the greatest keyboard music to emerge from these islands—is the perfect vehicle for Mahan Esfahani’s abundant talents. His accompanying booklet notes are an added bonus, guaranteed to inform, illuminate and provoke by turns.

Performed for the most part on a double-manual harpsichord made by Robert Goble & Son, Oxford (1990), kindly loaned by Bob Robertson and based on an instrument made by Carl Conrad Fleischer, Hamburg (1710); tracks 12, 15, 18 & 19 performed on virginals made by Huw Saunders, London (1989), kindly loaned by Huw Saunders and a copy of an instrument made by Thomas White, Old Jewry, London (1642). The temperament used for the recording was quarter-comma meantone, a’=408Hz.

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Mahan Esfahani – Bach: The Toccatas (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 9, 2023 · Comments off

The exuberant vitality of Bach’s toccatas—works which the young composer probably wrote to demonstrate his own brilliance and technique as a performer—here provides the perfect showcase for the interpretative flair of Mahan Esfahani.

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Michala Petri, Mahan Esfahani – Arcangelo Corelli – La Follia: Six Sonatas, Op. 5, No. 7-12 (2015) DSF DSD64

SACD / DSD By admin · November 16, 2022 · Comments off

Michala Petri, Mahan Esfahani – Arcangelo Corelli – La Follia: Six Sonatas, Op. 5, No. 7-12 (2015)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 01:06:22 minutes | 2,59 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Digital Booklet | © OUR Recordings

Fate blessed the Italian violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli with talent, modesty, wealthy patrons, faithful disciples and extraordinary riches.

Numerous original sources were consulted prior to the making of this disc during three inspired days of recording in Copenhagen’s Garnisons Kirke. But once the tape was rolling, Michala Petri and Mahan Esfahani let the excitement of superlative music making be their only guide, giving free rein to their boundless creativity and virtuosity and embracing the improvisational spirit that this music requires.

So widespread was Corelli’s appeal that copies of his works have been found as far afield as St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Constantinople, and even America (he was known to be a favourite composer of U.S.’s third president, Thomas Jefferson). It can be said without any exaggeration that Corelli was the first world-famous composer. Yet, for all his celebrity, only a handful of works have come down to us, with the Violin Sonatas op. 5 occupying pride of place. The sonatas presented here come from the second half of the op. 5 collection, referred to in the original 1700 publication as “Parte seconda: Preludii, Allemande, Correnti, Sarabande, Gavotte, e Follia.”

As the title suggests, the music was inspired by dance rhythms and their infectious melodiousness made them popular pieces with performers of all instruments; a couple of them even entered the English dance-tune repertory. The relatively simple nature of these movements provides scope for all sorts of ornamentation and improvisation.

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Mahan Esfahani – Bach, J.S.: Aria With 30 Variations, BWV 988 ‘Goldberg Variations’ (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 22, 2022 · Comments off

Mahan Esfahani - Bach, J.S.: Aria With 30 Variations, BWV 988 'Goldberg Variations' (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Mahan Esfahani – Bach, J.S.: Aria With 30 Variations, BWV 988 ‘Goldberg Variations’ (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:18:38 minutes | 979 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

The Bach performances of harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani are never boring and often fascinating. He has a way of using his instrument, here a contemporary version of a 1710 Thuringian harpsichord, to evoke a wide range of extramusical associations, and during a live performance of the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, he offered as an encore not another piece of music but a reading from Horace. One may be forgiven for thinking that this much-anticipated Goldberg Variations recording, released as Esfahani began a five-year traversal of Bach’s music at London’s Wigmore Hall, gets away from him a bit even as it displays the utterly distinctive thinking of the performer. Start with the booklet, where Esfahani begins with a pointless defense of the veracity of Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s account of the sleepless Russian Count Goldberg that gave the variations their name: Bach was said to have been asked to write variations that were then requested by the Count at his bedtime, presumably singly. The grand conceptions of the individual variations, explored by Esfahani in the booklet and excitingly realized at the keyboard, might be thought more likely to jolt the Count awake than to put him to sleep, and in general this is a Goldberg Variations that impresses more in its individual parts than in the whole. Esfahani speaks disdainfully of numerological interpretations of the score, which is perhaps understandable, but balance is as much a part of the score as distinctive evocative detail, and it gets lost in Esfahani’s interpretation. Sample Variation 24, the canon at the octave, which Esfahani likens to “the grand ensemble of horns and strings” at the beginning of the Cantata No. 65, “Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen,” BWV 65: it may be ringing and stirring, but it is less clearly linked to its surroundings, to say nothing of the snoozing Goldberg, than one would like. Nevertheless, for bold thinking on the harpsichord, Esfahani can’t be beat; he may be slightly better live than on recordings, and this is certainly a major new statement concerning the Goldberg Variations.
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Mahan Esfahani – Bach, C.P.E.: Württemberg Sonatas (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 22, 2022 · Comments off

Mahan Esfahani - Bach, C.P.E.: Württemberg Sonatas (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

‘This Iranian-American has carved out a niche as his instrument’s leading champion … his success is founded on remarkable artistry’ (International Piano)

‘Such virtuosity and disarming presentation suggests that Esfahani could inspire a whole new appreciation of the instrument’ (The Guardian)

Hyperion is delighted to present the debut recording of the wonderful young harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. He was the first harpsichordist to be named a BBC New Generation Artist or to be awarded a fellowship prize by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust.
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