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.

At first sight, it's impossible to believe that the artwork on the cover of our Toccatas album is anything other than a twenty-first-century, highly stylized black-and-white portrait (of an anguished Mahan, perhaps?). So it comes as a shock to realize that Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) was a near contemporary of Bach, and that the sculpture is the best part of 250 years old.

Messerschmidt is chiefly remembered for the series of extraordinary sculpted self-portraits he undertook towards the end of his life—there are a few much more conventional works which were royal commissions—which must count as some of the most remarkable sculptures of the eighteenth century. He gave them all the generic title 'Kopfstücke' and the humorously descriptive names linked to many (A Constipated Man, A Hypocrite and Slanderer, etc) are nineteenth-century accretions. Some commentators see in the extremity of the facial expressions the symptoms of mental illness (the artist claimed that the Kopfstücke helped protect him from evil spirits), but the Enlightenment saw a rise in interest in the artistic and scientific exploration of physiognomy—the collection of frighteningly lifelike wax anatomical models made for Joseph II dates from around the same time—as well as in radical ideas of art which look beyond conventional beauty. As such, the cover image provides the perfect match for Mahan's thrilling Bach, which is similarly, uncompromisingly, modern.