Anhad Arora (harpsichord)

This programme explores the vibrant world of early German keyboard music that shaped JS Bach’s own style and imagination.

It opens with the exuberant invention of his G major Toccata from where the lineage of this energy is traced through pieces by Bach’s North German predecessors and contemporaries. The programme culminates in Bach’s Toccata in D, with all the drama and structural mastery of Bach’s incredible output for keyboard.

Anhad Arora straddles the worlds of musicology and performance. Interested in historical instruments from a young age, he graduated from the RCMJD with the Freda Dinn Memorial Prize in Early Music, where he studied piano with Neil Roxburgh and harpsichord with Jane Chapman. He continued his formation with James Johnstone, while holding both an undergraduate academic scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and the repetiteur scholarship with New Chamber Opera. Anhad has since appeared with some of the country’s foremost groups, including the Academy of Ancient Music, the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and the Oxford Bach Soloists, for whom he serves as co-principal keyboardist, and performed in the some of the country’s most prestigious venues, such as the Wigmore Hall, The Sage in Gateshead, and Handel House, London.

Anhad’s academic work centres on early nineteenth-century German musical and literary culture. Having obtained a first-class Bachelor’s degree in Music and Master’s degree with Distinction in Musicology from Oxford, Anhad completed his doctorate, fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Clarendon Fund, on Orientalism and the German Lied between 1814 and 1840 at Merton College. He spent three months as a Research Fellow at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and a year as Theodor Heuss Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, which was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Anhad’s work on German song can be read in the Heine Jahrbuch (2021) and Publications of the English Goethe Society (2023). His German-language scholarship can be read in Mendelssohn-Studien (2025).

Programme:
JS Bach Toccata in G, BWV 916
Buxtehude Suite in D minor, BuxWV 234; ‘Rofilis’, BuxWV 248
Böhm Capriccio in D major
Kuhnau Musikalische Vorstellung einiger biblischer Historien, nr. 2
JS Bach Toccata in D, BWV 912

Performers:
Anhad Arora harpsichord