Mahan Esfahani

When he was a small boy of eight or nine, Mahan Esfahani picked up a book with a picture of a portly man in a wig and frockcoat, playing an unfamiliar musical instrument with two keyboards, and it was love at first sight. The next day he went to his local library to look at harpsichord scores. At 11, already a proficient pianist and organist, he heard a harpsichord being played live for the first time, at a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Fast-forward two decades and the harpsichord is the life’s mission of that Iranian American boy – born in Tehran, raised in Washington DC – who now resides in Prague. Today, he is firmly established as one of the world’s leading harpsichordists, and one of the youngest. He made his Deutsche Grammophon debut in 2015 with the release of Time Past and Time Present, inspired by the poetry of TS Eliot.