Mahan Esfahani, Harpsichordist

Since making his debut in London in 2009, Mahan Esfahani has made it his life’s mission to re-establish the harpsichord in the mainstream of concert instruments. To that end, he is the first harpsichordist in a generation to be active in virtually all areas of music-making from large completist projects of earlier composers to commissioning over twenty new solo and concertante works for the harpsichord.

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With recitals of the entire range of old and new harpsichord literature at London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Wiener Musikverein, Klavier Festival Ruhr the Edinburgh International Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the BBC Proms, the Walt Disney Hall of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Madrid’s Fundacion March, L’Auditori Barcelona, Zürich’s Tonhalle, and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Esfahani has taken the harpsichord beyond the realm of the esoteric into a new area of appreciation from all angles of concert life. His work with new music has extended to collaborations with leading and emerging composers of the day: Gavin Bryars, Miroslav Srnka, Kaija Saariaho, Brett Dean, Poul Ruders, Daniel Kidane, Laurence Osborn, Francisco Coll, Anahita Abbasi, Atsuhiko Gondai, Marcus Rock, Nilufar Habibian, to name a few.

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Esfahani’s extensive discography — in addition to the ongoing complete series of Bach’s keyboard works for Hyperion/Universal — includes an album of 20th-century Czech harpsichord concertos for Hyperion that won a 2023 Opus Klassik in Berlin, sonata by CPE Bach (Gramophone Award 2014), the complete keyboard pieces of Jean-Philippe Rameau (New York Times Best Recordings 2014), and the album Musique? of modern electroacoustic works for harpsichord (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik quarterly list 2021). Recording collaborations include the Brandenburg Project on BIS with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Dausgaard, Dutilleux’s Les Citations with the Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot, and four albums with Michala Petri — a collaboration particularly close to his heart. The totality of these activities is attested by extensive features on his work in The New York Times, Gramophone, De Volkskrant, and a variety of music industry and culture publications. In 2022 he was awarded the Wigmore Hall Prize.