Mahan Esfahani, Royal Over-Seas League

The Iranian-born virtuoso musician Mahan Esfahani has caused a sensation and scooped numerous awards with his radical rethink about playing the often straight-laced harpsichord. One rowdy concert in Cologne raised a good number of musical eyebrows. Think Nigel Kennedy, but at the keyboard...

On 28 November he performs both the baroque music you might expect and later music, which you might not, when he joins the scintillating London-based string orchestra, the Russian Virtuosi of Europe, conducted by Yuri Zhislin.

The concert opens the Eastern Seasons week of cultural, sport and business events in London, a platform for Russian-British arts and economic affairs, music in particular crossing all language and cultural barriers.




The Russian Virtuosi of Europe are outstanding players based in London

The concert, entitled Time Regained, opens with JS Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D Minor and then leaps nearly 250 years to Henryk Górecki's Harpsichord Concerto of 1980.

In the second half of the programme, Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances are followed by Tchaikovsky's Souvenir De Florence. If you haven’t heard Tchaikovsky played by the Russian Virtuosi, you haven’t lived. I first heard them in this same intimate venue. All distinguished soloists and ensemble players in their own right, they don't often perform together, but when they do, it's electrifying.