Seeking a unique gift? Try a musical portrait

A painted portrait, a drawing, a sculptural likeness — all of these feel like natural works of art to commission if you have the means and the inclination. But a piece of music? That has a real 16th-century, Italian-duke vibe to it.
Arsha Kaviani, 33, laughs when I point this out. The sharply dressed British-Iranian musician is seated at a gleaming piano in Steinway Hall in central London, occasionally turning to the keyboard to illustrate our conversation.
He’s a little tired, having just flown in from St Barts (which gives you an idea of the circles in which he operates), but he remains eloquent and enthusiastic, and disconcertingly good at eye contact.
As well as being a rising star concert pianist, known for his unconventional performances, mentored by Stephen Hough, Lang Lang and Daniel Barenboim, through his production company Maison Musique Kaviani he produces bespoke musical compositions; in particular what could be described as “musical portraits” for private clients including, recently, Ceawlin and Emma Thynn (often known as Emma Weymouth), the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath.
“The output of the great classical composers would really have been nearly nil if it wasn’t for patrons of the art,” Kaviani says. “I always thought it was bizarre that you could commission a sculptor, you could commission an artist, [but] musically that never seemed to be the case,” he says. “It’s so strange. Music to me, objectively speaking, is the most directly moving art form. You could show a completely uneducated person a Jackson Pollock, but what do they know of fractals? There’s a sense of needing to be educated to appreciate a lot of visual arts. Whereas music, you know, you could sit somebody down and …” He begins noodling on the piano, shifting keys and tones to manipulate the mood, and he is, of course, perfectly correct. I can practically feel my heartstrings being plucked.
“I love to think of myself as a professional emotional manipulator,” he says with a smile, “using frequencies, harmonies, melodies. I think this is why I’ve never had a single commission where they were like, ‘OK, that’s fantastic. Have a nice life.’ It’s always been multiple commissions. They’re like, ‘And can I get this? And this, and this? And can you do this in a different style?”
One of his most prolific clients first asked for a piano sonata, and has since commissioned two albums from Kaviani with the celebrated soul singer Hannah Williams.
The process is always different, he says. It’s not like he’s working from a photograph; it’s more exploratory than that. “Almost never stylistically am I told how to do it,” he says. “I’ll speak to the client about what music has moved them before and then immediately I’m thinking, ‘These frequencies are going to make them feel this,’ or ‘I’m not going to use this.’ For a client whose prompt to me is that they love Debussy and they love Bill Evans, I’m not going to create an atonal, microtonal world music-infused sort of thing, you know. It’s like a Venn diagram of EQ, hopefully IQ and musical ability; a process of trying every single thing in order to get the desired emotional effect.”
The cost varies too, starting from about £7,500 for a smaller, solo work, heading up to and above £50,000 for a mid-sized piece with several instrument lines, and six figures for a full album. Depending on the size and complexity of the piece, it can take anything from a couple of weeks to several months from commission to delivery.
The inventor and entrepreneur Mike Watson, who commissioned Kaviani to create a piece for his wife (the couple have since divorced but remain close friends), is lavish in his praise for the musician. “Arsha does to music what Monet does to canvas,” he tells me.
His piece, Song for Julie, is a beautiful three-minute work that evokes the comfort they found and continue to find in their long relationship. It’s for piano and cello — Watson is a former classical cellist, and the cello line is simple enough that someone who might be a bit rusty can play it without too much difficulty, but complex enough to maintain the player and the listener’s interest.
The pieces come as a professional recording along with the framed manuscript, written beautifully on Amalfi silk paper, and listening notes. “I’ve bought every kind of gift imaginable, but this is incredibly unique and for me, moving,” Watson says. “You can’t buy love. You can buy a composition, but it’s very hard to buy the emotion that comes with that.”
He says he gave the recording to his PA and his head of PR on a motivational business break so they could listen to it “and then I saw them in the corner crying their eyes out. You know you’ve hit the right note when that happens.”
Evita and Eckhard Pfeiffer (the former president and chief executive of Compaq) are also keen supporters and clients. “I met Arsha when he was very young,” Evita tells me from her home in Austria. “I met him in Dubai when he was playing in the Burj Al Arab at the age of 16 and I realised how talented he was. And ever since I have been watching him. And with time you become friends as well.”
The family are musical — their daughter is a musicologist, their son plays the violin — and they asked Kaviani to write a reflection on the violin-playing son and his bride, both of whom Kaviani knew, for their wedding.
“When he plays, he enters into the world of music. And I think only somebody who does that can compose,” Evita says. She characterises what Kaviani does as taking influences from masters of the past, but creating something entirely contemporary, a description with which he’d agree.
“There is a tendency [now] for composers to try to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “[They] are so keen to circumvent the great composers that came before them, instead of drawing on that; not to be ‘derivative’.” He points out that when Mozart was commissioned to write an opera, it might often have been required to be derivative of an earlier classical style.
Working within restrictions, such as stylistic preferences of clients, he says, “becomes a beautiful way to concentrate your abilities as a composer, and to test them”. His debut album, Accents and Echoes, which has just been released, is a celebration of and reflection on his many influences, from Portishead to Bach, Khruangbin to Medtner or traditional Persian music.
Kaviani was born in Dubai in 1990, his parents having left Iran for the UAE in the late 1970s. That their young son would go completely quiet every time they put a record on — and when his older brother was practising the piano — was the first inkling they had that he might be musical.
They paid for him to have lessons too, but Dubai is not known for its classical music provision, even now, and in a very few years his teachers announced that they’d done all that they could and he needed to go away to study. He went to Chetham’s in Manchester, then to the Royal Northern College of Music in the same city. He now lives in London.
Yet he credits these early, pre-Spotify years in Dubai — listening to his parents’ eclectic music collection from Beethoven and Mozart to Led Zeppelin and Metallica, printing out sheet music and puzzling out all the orchestral parts on the piano to get a sense of what it sounded like (I would recommend digging out his astonishing arrangement of Rachmaninov’s barnstorming orchestral Concerto No 2 for solo piano) — for his multi-layered influences and, crucially, his magpie-like, free and easy creativity.
It was “the biggest blessing on earth”, he says. “The biggest benefit I had in the Middle East was there was nobody to tell me what I could not do. If I was a young talent here, particularly today, chances are the local piano teacher would know somebody at the Royal College, I’d play to them, and then suddenly, I’m in their world and on their trajectory.” He puts on a quite convincing “posh old duffer” voice. “‘You’re far too young to tackle Rachmaninov. Don’t even bother. Wait until you have full grey hair and dandruff on your sweater and then you can tackle late Schubert.’ And it’s really unfortunate but there’s that mentality. Not considering that actually Schubert died of syphilis at 31.” There’s a lot of what he calls “trajectorial gatekeeping”. “You have to go down this path because I went down this path and my teachers before me went down this path. But [in Dubai] I was basically creating a lot of my own piano techniques, from a point of being results-focused: how can I create the sound I want on this instrument?”
With astonishing ease and pinpoint emotional accuracy, from what my poor heartstrings are telling me. Accents and Echoes is out now on SRSLY, maisonkaviani.com or available to stream via lnk.to/arshakaviani