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Artist: Mahan Esfahani
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Bach - Goldberg Variations

Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani Records Bach's Goldberg Variations for Deutsche Grammophon

Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani approaches one of the greatest works of the Baroque repertoire with fresh eyes: Bach's incomparable Goldberg Variations.  Following the success of his DG debut album, Time Present Time Past, Esfahani returns to the baroque and records one of the keyboard's undisputed masterpieces.  The album will be released on August 26, 2016.

Not only are the Goldberg Variations recognized for their genius, they are also surrounded by a number of stories.  Esfahani says, "I haven't the foggiest notion of what Bach's "Goldberg" Variations "are" and I find most of the cosmological and numerological chatter around them to be tremendously irritating, but I cannot deny that I find a great deal of narrative and life beyond the score when I play them. Coming in the last decade of the composer's life, they offer us a view both of someone looking back on his decades-long aesthetic transformation and of an innovative and sensitive musician responding to new trends and techniques around him."

Esfahani returns to the US on October 6, 2016, for a concert with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and again in March 2017 for recitals in Princeton, New York and Durham.

Of Esfahani's DG debut album, Time Present Time Past, the New York Times said, "A model recording for any instrument, not just the harpsichord ... Exhaustingly brilliant."

Mahan Esfahani:

Time Present and Time Past

Minimalism meets Baroque with Mahan Esfahani's new recording on Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv Produktion, Time Present and Time Past

He's a brilliant player - two days after this recital I'm still tingling over his forensic attack and silk-smooth arpeggios - but he also knows about friendly presentation… Dashingly eloquent, dizzyingly skilled, Esfahani makes the harpsichord seem an instrument reborn." (The Times)

On Time Present and Time Past, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani brings together Baroque music and minimalism-two forms of music one might not utter in the same breath, but that share a certain DNA-on this daring new album.

Of the project, Esfahani says "As I started to understand the great possibilities of minimalist style, my mind began to make connections to the same techniques-specifically the manipulation of patterns and "cells" of material-as practiced by composers of the 17th and 18th centuries."

On Time Present and Time Past, he performs pieces that exemplify Baroque and minimalism and explores the relationship between two musical genres that are 300 years apart.

He performs all the works on period instruments –par for the course with the works of Bach, Handel and Geminiani-but groundbreaking when applied to Steve Reich's Piano Phase, which Esfahani performs on harpsichord and overdubs himself.

Also featured is Henryk Gorecki's electrifying Harpsichord Concerto, Op. 40 (1980) where is joined by the Concerto Köln, and works by Scarlatti and CPE Bach. By re-contextualizing minimalist music in the Baroque period, the listener is forced to reconsider the relationship between them, and reconsider time past and time present.