The young guitarist Mak Grgic is a versatile figure who has reached into pop (he opened for pop star k.d. lang on tour) but also experimented with the fairly arcane world of microtonal playing. MAK/Bach involves some of the same duality; Bach's music transfers well to the guitar, and albums of Bach transcribed for the instrument are widely enjoyed. Grgic is a wonderful Bach player, graceful and attentive to small detail, and the studio work of his MicroFest Records engineers is superb. Then there's the more obscure side. Grgic plays a guitar with movable frets (there's an image in the booklet notes), and it's tuned here to a temperament called Kirnberger III devised by Bach's contemporary Johann Kirnberger. The "Well-Tempered Guitar" heading in the notes is a bit of a misnomer, for this differs from the equal temperament that Bach sought to popularize with his Well-Tempered Clavier keyboard collection in which everything is slightly adjusted so as to make all the intervals equal and give pieces played in any key roughly the same effect. It takes a bit of ear-tuning for those used to equal temperament, but the effect is intriguing. Grgic quotes Kirnberger to the effect that "each key has its own special degrees and intervals through which it receives its own character." Here, listeners get to try it out mostly for the keys of A minor (the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor is transposed to that key) and D major. Chorales with pungent dissonances frame the multi-movement pieces and condition the ear, as it were, to some of the more extreme dissonances found in the multi-movement works. Of the group of guitarists emerging from Eastern Europe, Grgic is perhaps the most interesting, and this beautifully recorded album offers a good place to sample his work.