Mahan Esfahani continues his survey of Bach, digging now into the Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach and their fascinating miscellany of insights into the composer’s domestic life. Two notebooks exist. The first, from 1722, contains a fragmentary account of works better known as the French Suites along with a handful of other short pieces. The second, more lavish and complete notebook is from 1725 and includes a fascinating array of short works by Bach, pieces borrowed from other composers including François Couperin and Georg Böhm, pedagogical exercises, arias, chorales, the Aria or Sarabande from the Goldberg Variations and short juvenilia attributed to Bach’s sons, including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian.

Esfahani’s most recent Bach recording was the Clavierübung II (A/22), the monumental collection that includes the Italian Concerto and the Overture in the French Style. For that, the harpsichordist used his own robust, double-manual, mighty instrument with a 16ft stop. This more intimate survey is performed on two instruments, a relatively plangent clavichord based on a historical model likely by Johann Heinrich Silbermann and a single-manual harpsichord modelled on an exquisite court instrument by Michael Mietke, at the Schloss Charlottenburg.

Everything is scaled down. When Nicholas McGegan recorded these works with the beloved mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in 1990, he included a cello to fill out the accompaniment in the vocal works. That enriched the texture and gave the performances an appealing fluidity. Esfahani opts for just harpsichord to support his appealing soloist, Carolyn Sampson. The difference between what is effectively a concert performance and Esfahani’s parlour-scale reading is marked. And his performance of the Couperin Rondeau – ‘Les bergeries’ from the sixth ordre – is rendered on the clavichord, which gives it a quicksilver expressive profile while downplaying the music’s suavity and sophistication.

Among the delights here are short works by Bach’s sons, including a handful of pieces by CPE that suggest a young composer already well advanced down his own idiosyncratic path. Esfahani has considerable fun with the jaunty little March in G, adding some bumptious ornamentation in the repeats. His rendering of the G minor Polonaise makes considerably more sense than the rather too stately version by Nicholas McGegan in his survey of the Notebooks.

This is a collection of miniatures, and as the artist admits in his booklet notes, nothing here rises to the level of Bach at his greatest. But he also cautions against condescension. There’s no reason to assume that Anna Magdalena, highly trained and from a deeply musical background, was a trifling artist. Nor is the intimate scale of this music a sign of insignificance. Rather, it is proof of the deep musicality that flowed through the Bach household, from husband to wife and generation to generation. There is a truth in snapshots not always available in grand, finished portraits. And the latter are often based on the momentary revelations and fragmentary snatches of life that are analogues to the musical sketches found in collections such as this one.