Piano Man

Arsha Kaviani has turned bespoke musical compositions into luxury products for the 21st century.

- Mark Ellwood

IT’S THE FINGERS you notice first. When Arsha Kaviani talks, he moves his hands, absent-mindedly, like a conductor, his long, elegant fingers dancing through the air. At other times, he seems to be gliding them over an invisible keyboard, a pianist forever stuck mid-recital. And perhaps, subconsciously at least, Kaviani is always on the concert stage. Now 34 years old, the former child prodigy has grown into a sophisticated music professional, adept not only at performing the classical works of his conservatory training and at composing but also at operating a business that marries those talents for the luxury consumer. There’s a rich, centuries-old history of wunderkinder like this, but Kaviani stands apart, as he has found clever ways to modernise the long tradition of musical patronage for the 21st century.

When he was growing up in Dubai in the 1990s and early aughts, there was nowhere to obtain classical sheet music. “So I would find a library in Uzbekistan that had uploaded it as a PDF file and every day I would send something to my father, who printed it out from his office computer,” he recalls, sitting in a basement practice studio in London’s Soho, where the walls and ceiling are covered in ornate sound-muffling wallpaper. “Every night it was like Christmas. I can still smell the photocopies.”

He has come a long way since then. Now based in London, Kaviani jets around the world as a composer for hire. Under his Maison Musique Kaviani banner, he runs a unique operation, accepting commissions from wealthy patrons for original compositions, whether a single musical portrait or an entire album's worth of songs.