Czech Chamber Music Society • Mahan Esfahani

Mahan Esfahani, a non-conformist artist and experimenter, has made it his life’s goal to restore the harpsichord’s standing as a usual instrument for concert performing. He also intends to raise the instrument’s interpretive standards because, as he himself puts it: “I have heard leading representatives of the world of the harpsichord play recitals that sounded like someone had just died.” His tireless pursuit of new music for his instrument has drawn the attention of listeners and critics all over Europe, Asia, and North America. From 2008 to 2010, he was the first and only harpsichordist to hold the title of BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and in 2009 he won the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. He has been nominated repeatedly for the title of Artist of the Year by the music magazine Gramophone. In 2022 he became the youngest recipient of the Wigmore Medal for his significant artistic contribution to that London concert hall and his long-term relationship with it. Previous medal recipients have included Thomas Quasthoff and the artist-in-residence for the 128th season of the Czech Philharmonic, Sir András Schiff.

Esfahani’s excellence has earned him the chance to perform on most of the world’s most important stages such as Wigmore Hall mentioned above (where he has appeared more the 40 times), Tokyo’s Oji Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera, and the Berlin Konzerthaus. He has appeared as a soloist with such orchestras as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonic, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In 2011 he played the first harpsichord recital in the history of London’s BBC Proms.

You can hear Mahan Esfahani not only on the concert stage, but also at home: he has made seven recordings covering a wide range of repertoire on the Hyperion and Deutsche Grammophon (DG) labels; in 2014 he signed an exclusive recording contract with DG. His recordings have received critical acclaim, earning him a Gramophone Award, the BBC Music Magazine Award, and the Diapason d’Or. He works in close collaboration with BBC Radio, and he is preparing programmes on the beginnings of classical music by African-American composers and on the development of orchestral music in Azerbaijan.

Mahan Esfahani was born in Teheran and grew up in the USA, where he studied musicology and history at Stanford University. It was there, in the studio of Elaine Thornburgh, that he first came into contact with the harpsichord. He then studied privately under Peter Watchorn in Boston and then in Prague under his role model Zuzana Růžičková as her last pupil. (Esfahani’s repertoire naturally includes the Harpsichord Concerto by Viktor Kalabis, the husband of Zuzana Růžičková.) After three years as artist-in-residence at Oxford University’s New College, he became an honorary member at Oxford’s Keble College and a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

He finally settled in Prague. He owns a harpsichord made to his specifications, allowing him to cover repertoire of the last four centuries of musical development. It has several extra manuals and an added 16-foot register. He also dreams of having a quarter-tone harpsichord that would allow him, as he describes it, to “explore the harpsichord’s possibilities through to the bone”.

Despite her youth, Anna Paulová, a winner of the Jiří Bělohlávek Prize, has already enjoyed a number of successes in competitions and on the concert stage. “All musicians have a natural tone colour and personality of their own. One just needs to find that, and not try to imitate anyone else”, says the young clarinettist, who is a laureate of the 2015 Prague Spring International Music Competition (Second Prize, Bohuslava Martinů Foundation Prize, Gideon Klein Foundation Prize) and a semi-finalist of the prestigious ARD International Music Competition in Munich (2019), among other honours. The list of all her successes at international competitions is quite long. “I was very lucky to get into Milan Polák’s studio at the conservatoire; he started sending me to various international competitions right from my first year. First I took part at the conservatoire’s competition, then there were competitions in Italy, Slovenia, Germany, and Poland, and that was a great experience for me. It also motivated me that I was coming home from every competition with the first prize”, says Anna Paulová looking back on her early years of study. She is now a doctoral student at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Besides Milan Polák, her other teachers at the Prague Conservatoire included Ludmila Peterková, then she studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under Jiří Hlaváč and Vlastimil Mareš. She furthered her studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck, where she had lessons with Sabine Meyer and Reiner Wehle, at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp studying under Annelien van Wauwe, and at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome under the guidance of Alessandro Carbonare. She has developed her performing skill at many masterclasses led by soloists and teachers including Sharon Kam, Shirley Brill, Charles Neidich, Yehuda Gilad, and Martin Fröst.

She began her solo career at age 15, making her debut with the Prague Philharmonia and the conductor Leoš Svárovský. Since then, she has appeared with more top Czech and foreign orchestras including the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Pardubice Chamber Philharmonic, the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic in Zlín, the Münchener Kammerorchester, the Orquestra Cascais e Oeiras in Portugal, and the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana. In 2014, she made her solo debut with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Jiří Bělohlávek.

Besides pursuing a solo career, she also appears in chamber music with many outstanding instrumentalists including Charles Neidich, Ivo Kahánek, Martin Kasík, Václav Hudeček, Tomáš Jamník, and Lubomír Brabec. She performs Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in its original version for basset clarinet, but she otherwise focuses mainly on music by Czech composers of the 20th and 21st centuries (Bohuslav Martinů, Karel Husa, Viktor Kalabis, Josef Páleníček, Miloslav Ištvan, Jiří Teml, Zdeněk Šesták and others). She also collaborates with composers of the younger generation.

Milan Al-Ashhab, winner of the prestigious International violin competition Fritz Kreisler in Vienna, New York Concert Artists and Associates Worldwide Debut Audition (2018) and laureate of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow (2019), graduated from the Teplice Conservatory (Květoslava Hasilová) and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (Ivan Štraus). Since 2019 he has been studying at Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna under the leadership of Peter Schuhmayer, deepening his knowledge at several masterclasses (Pinchas Zukerman, Gábor Takács-Nagy or Hagai Shaham).

He has collaborated with several Czech and foreign orchestras (ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Czech Philharmonic, Moscow Symphonic Orchestra, Hofer Symphoniker, Lʼarmonia terrena etc.) and regularly performs with Czech pianist and composer Adam Skoumal (Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall, Merkin Hall New York, Vienna Musikverein, Prague Spring, Mendelssohn festival in Switzerland). 

Milan Al-Ashhab plays a precious Italian instrument by Nicola Amati (Cremona, 1662), kindly lent by Swiss organisation Maggini-Stiftung.