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.

Esfahani writes:

“The toccatas are amongst Bach’s most mysterious works due to the paradoxical scenario of a largely taciturn composer refusing to tell us exactly what we should do while simultaneously presenting scores so clearly in need of the (respectful) intervention—or, rather, participation—of a performer. They reward the keyboardist with the beautiful sparks emanating from the perpetual conflict between disorderly flamboyance and everlasting truth, a brief glimpse of something sacred showing itself to us through an old box with some strings stretched across it—as Eliade puts it, ‘the manifestation of something of a wholly different order … in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world’.”