Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Mahan Esfahani

Bookending a new harpsichord concerto from Gavin Bryars for the renowned virtuoso Mahan Esfahani, two underrated symphonies are given highly commendable performances in Liverpool.

The harpsichordist brought a highly personal, deeply engrossing interpretation that invited the listener to consider this familiar work anew.

Six pieces, all of them different, all of them new to the Proms, most by living composers, and all played superbly. A great contemporary music Prom.

A varied programme of harpsichord pieces interleaves with songs from Shakespeare and the following century.

Thrilling and spellbinding experimental music for harpsichord and electronics, performed by Mahan Esfahani. 

To reach the mother lode of Bach's keyboard music, you have to listen to it on harpsichord, and today, no performer embodies that mother lode more than Mahan Esfahani.

Czech harpsichord legend Zuzana Růžičková would have turned 91 on 14 January, making it an ideal night for a tribute concert featuring one of her star pupils, Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. As he noted in brief remarks sandwiched between rousing renditions of Bach, “When she died, I lost a great teacher. But this country lost part of its history.

Notwithstanding Esfahani and McKeish’s sterling account of the Poulenc and the orchestra’s thrilling take on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, this was not a consistent enough concert to be called a complete success.

Showcasing the talents of two highly proficient chamber musicians, this was a terrific insight into a lost world spanning the Baroque and early Classical periods.

Booking a solo Bach harpsichord programme at Germany's biggest club festival was an unlikely, even bold move. But despite the unusual surrounding, Mahan Esfahani's performance proved to be truly magical.

Harry Bicket's eclectic, Baroque-centered program shows the many side of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This Southbank Centre concert of five of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's symphonies, alongside his Concerto in E flat for Harpsichord and Fortepiano showed just how much of a revolutionary this oft-overlooked composer was. The OAE were conducted by Rebecca Miller.

In an age of modern convenience and so-called progress, it’s refreshing to witness an endeavor by a group of enthusiastic young musicians seeking to dig up music’s past. Bojan Cicic and his ensemble Suonar Cantando put on a marvelous display of musical responsibility by treating this repertoire with the fire it deserves.

Baroque music is pretty old, isn’t it? But the great thing is, you don’t have to have the advanced years of a Brandenburg Concerto to put it on. The Oxford Philomusica has been active for little more than a decade – and they rushed through the pouring rain to play at the similarly young St George’s Bristol.

At the splendid venue that is Cadogan Hall, just north of London’s Sloane Square, Iranian-born harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani demonstrated J S Bach’s immense skill and ingenuity in a spellbinding performance of the Goldberg Variations, one of the high Himalayan peaks of the keyboard repertoire.

Entitled “Monteverdi, Opera and Beyond”, lyric tenor and baroque specialist Paul Agnew devised a 90 minute programme exploring the role of recitative in Monteverdi’s opera and its influence on seventeenth-century English and French operatic music.

Il Maestro e Margherita: eine Reihe geistlicher Kantaten hatte der junge Händel in Rom für seine Lieblingssängerin Margherita geschrieben.

Über ein Konzert von W. F. Bach 1774 gibt es zu lesen: „Alles was die Empfindung berauscht, Neuheit der Gedanken, frappante Ausweichungen, dissonierende Sätze...“. Bei La Scintilla und Minasi galt selbiges.