The next instalment of Mahan Esfahani’s highly regarded survey of the composer’s keyboard works delivers Book 1 of Bach’s The well-tempered Clavier. Those qualities which reviewers have praised throughout the series—‘daredevil spontaneity’ (Prospect), ‘absolute mastery’ (Gramophone) and a ‘fearless improvisatory approach’ (BBC Record Review)—remain very much in evidence in this compelling account of one of the peaks of the repertoire. With the bonus of essays from the instrument maker and the harpsichord technician, as well as Mahan’s own extensive booklet note—in which he discusses the performing, instrumental and scholarly histories of the ‘48’ over the course of the intervening three hundred years—September’s Record of the Month again confirms the truth of BBC Record Review’s claim that ‘Mahan Esfahani couldn’t make a routine recital of Bach’s keyboard music if you paid him to’.

‘Unique in its terrible magnificence, gloomy and bleak, as if one were walking among dark tombs’ was the awe-struck reaction of a nineteenth-century music historian to the Requiem Mass recorded here by the all-male adult voices of De Profundis in Cristóbal de Morales’s Requiem a 5 & Officium defunctorum. Coupled with Morales’s music for the Office for the Dead, it still packs as great an emotional punch today as it must have done in the mid-sixteenth century. This album is the second in a series of twelve that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats; Eamonn Dougan conducts.

It is probably fair to say that vocal music—or more specifically the songs/mélodies/Lieder of an age largely gone before us—was something of a passion for the late, great Ted Perry, founder of Hyperion Records. Right from the start albums were produced covering an extraordinary range of this repertoire, from complete cycles of Schubert, Brahms and the like, all the way through to wildly esoteric mixed-bag albums, their programmes as enchantingly crafted as their accompanying documentation was fastidiously curated (woe betide the unfortunate Booklet Editor who committed an inaccurate song text to print!). We’re pleased to be able to offer a diverse array of these treasurable albums at a reduced price until the end of September: CDs are just £10.00 each, with download prices reducing correspondingly, and we hope you will find albums to whet your interest. Some highlights are listed below and are included on Vol. 2 of our August sampler (free to download), and you can also » Click here for a full listing.

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Resonance brings together major chamber works by Schumann and Farrenc, plus three duos from the much-neglected figure of Lucien Durosoir. Louise Farrenc’s piano quintet is a work full of Beethovenian passion. Originally conceived as a sextet for piano and winds, this is the first recording of the composer’s own revision for piano and string quartet, and it is performed on this new album from Signum Classics by Emmanuel Despax and the Piatti Quartet.

For a new album on Decca Classics, stunning young pianist Yunchan Lim presents Tchaikovsky’s The seasons—a set of twelve miniatures (they actually depict months rather than seasons) commissioned and published by a popular Russian arts journal over the course of 1876. These are pieces ostensibly aimed at the domestic music-making market, of course, but Tchaikovsky goes well beyond his brief, contributing works of a delicate intimacy which are more than able to tease out the skills of even so polished a performer as we have here.

Irish National Opera continue their collaboration with Signum Classics presenting a double-bill of Trade & Mary Motorhead by Emma O’Halloran. These are what could be termed ‘cutting-edge’ operas—Trade depicting the awkwardness of a paid-for sexual encounter between an older and a younger man, Mary Motorhead giving the eponymous anti-heroine the chance to explain her moniker (she’s stabbed her husband, among other things). Elaine Kelly conducts, with Naomi Louisa O’Connell playing Mary, and Oisín Ó Dálaigh and John Molloy the guesthouse visitors.