Mahan Esfahani awarded Wigmore Medal

Mahan Esfahani is to be given the Wigmore Medal, an award which celebrates ‘major international artists and significant figures in the classical music world who have a strong association with the hall’.

Once dubbed a ‘harpsichord ninja’ by the BBC, the Iranian-American harpsichordist joins a roster of winners including pianists Angela Hewitt and Sir Andras Schiff, baritone Christian Gerhaher and the Takács String Quartet. The prize was inaugurated in 2007.

Wigmore Hall’s artistic director John Gilhooly will present the medal after Esfahani’s performance of JS Bach’s Art of Fugue on 16 July, marking the final recital in a Bach cycle that began in 2017. It’s a particularly personal moment. Esfahani, who made his London and Wigmore debut in 2009, wrote in The Times a decade later that ‘Johann Sebastian Bach is my favourite figure in all of history: the master of masters, the big wig in the sky’. Bach wrote the Art of Fugue in the last decade of his life, and although left incomplete the music finds the composer at the height of his contrapuntal mastery.

Over the past five years, Esfahani has explored Bach’s keyboard music at the prestigious London venue – including a live broadcast of the complete Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier from an empty auditorium during the pandemic in 2021. Yet Esfahani has become equally well known for championing contemporary music for his instrument, playing music by composers including Gorecki, Saariaho and Carter. The New Yorker noted his ability to make the harpsichord appeal to new audiences, giving ‘an almost hipsterish profile to an instrument that has often been stereotyped as archaic and twee’. As well as solo recitals, he has given concerto and chamber performances at the hall, with partners including the Britten Sinfonia, record player Michala Petri and violinist Jennifer Pike.