nicholas daniel & mahan esfahani

Maconchy: Bagatelles

Couperin: 14ème Concert Royal

Koch: Die Frage nach der Dinglichkeit (world première)

Nicholas Daniel’s long and distinguished career began when, at the age of 18, he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition and went on to win further competitions in Europe. As one of the UK’s most distinguished soloists as well as a highly successful conductor, he has become an important ambassador for music and musicians in many different fields. In recognition of this, he was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Medal for Music.

He is Artistic Director of the Leicester International Festival. He teaches in the UK and in Germany, where is he Professor of Oboe at the Musikhochschule, Trossingen.

An active chamber musician, Nicholas is a founder member of both the Haner Wind Ensemble and the Britten Oboe Quartet, whose debut disc of oboe quartets was released on the Harmonia Mundi label in 2017. He also regularly works with the pianists Charles Owen and Julius Drake, and with many wonderful string quartets including the Carducci and Vogler quartets.

Mahan Esfahani has made it his life’s mission to rehabilitate the harpsichord in the mainstream of concert instruments, and to that end his creative programming and work in commissioning new works have drawn the attention of critics and audiences across Europe, Asia, and North America. He was the rst and only harpsichordist to be a BBC New Generation Artist (2008-2010), a Borletti-Buitoni prize winner (2009), and a nominee for Gramophone’s Artist of the Year (2014, 2015, and 2017).

His richly-varied discography includes six critically-acclaimed recordings for Hyperion and Deutsche Grammophon – garnering one Gramophone award, two BBC Music Magazine Awards, a Diapason d’Or and ‘Choc de Classica’ in France, and an ICMA.

Esfahani studied musicology and history at Stanford University, where he rst came into contact with the harpsichord in the class of Elaine Thornburgh. Following his decision to abandon the law for music, he studied harpsichord privately in Boston with Peter Watchorn before completing his formation under the celebrated Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková. Following a three-year stint as Artist-in-Residence at New College, Oxford, he continues his academic associations as an honorary member at Keble College, Oxford, and as professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He can be frequently heard as a commentator on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and as a host for such programmes as Record Review, Building a Library, and Sunday Feature, as well as in live programmes with the popular mathematician and presenter Marcus du Sautoy; for the BBC’s Sunday Feature he is currently at work on his fourth radio documentary following two popular programmes on such subjects as the early history of African-American composers in the classical sphere and the development of orchestral music in Azerbaijan.

Born in Tehran in 1984 and raised in the United States, he lived in Milan and then London for several years before taking up residence in Prague.