How Pianist Arsha Kaviani Turns Original Compositions Into Musical Portraits (2025)

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 modernize 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 in pdf format, and every single 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.

He started playing piano by accident, after his parents noticed he’d go quiet when they put on a record or his older brother (who now works in finance and moonlights making electronic music) was practicing for his piano lessons. The couple had eventually settled in the UAE after emigrating from Iran in the revolution’s wake. “What was amazing about being born in the Middle East then was that essentially it was a blank canvas for life,” Kaviani says. “There was no template for me to follow in the classical-music space.” There was also little infrastructure, as his scouring for sheet music showed. Winning the Young Musician of the Gulf Competition in Bahrain at 14 gained him notice, and he ended up at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, England, boarding as a teen on a full scholarship. His time there, and then at the Royal Northern College of Music, was transformative, propelling him into a new orbit, both via his teaching and the circles he could now access. “I would get picked up at the train station by Vladimir Jurowski,” he recalls, name-checking the acclaimed Russian-born conductor, “with Wagner blaring out of his Ford Fiesta, and we’d drive to the backstage at Glyndebourne, where I’d play a concerto that I was working on to him.”

Indeed, perhaps Kaviani’s unacknowledged talent isn’t musical but interpersonal: Like the best Renaissance artists and classical composers, he collects powerful patrons, and his conversation is peppered with familiar names. In person, he’s ferociously loquacious and, well, composed. He doesn’t blanch at the opportunity to mention that his first music teacher described him as having “the musical-equivalent IQ of a little Mozart,” but he’s also disarmingly candid. He doesn’t bat away any questions, and he answers thoughtfully each time, both in the practice studio and another day when I join him at a client’s lavish townhouse in Knightsbridge. Kaviani is dressed all in black, staring intensely, and it’s easy for me to see the teenager who arrived in a cold, rainy Manchester 20 years ago. It was just as WAG culture—when wealthy soccer pros and their wives and girlfriends (or WAGs) became pop-culture fixtures—had crested. Many Manchester United players lived nearby, and younger athletes signed to its prestigious youth team trained on the same grounds. Kaviani found himself in their midst, albeit without the monetary support a football contract guaranteed. “A lot of my friends were footballers, around my age, and they were in a similar situation to me,” he says, before correcting himself. “Financially, very, very different, but they also needed to have a sense of self-belief, keeping themselves steady while you have your eye on the prize.”

The prodigy was primed for a career as a concert pianist, sponsored by Steinway and signed by an agent at the age of 20—all thanks to an intervention by renowned pianist Krystian Zimerman, Kaviani says: “He called them up and said, ‘I’ve never done this before, but I need you to take this guy on.’ ” In Kaviani’s view, the biggest obstacle to his rise was his Iranian passport: With that country an international pariah, he was constantly running into red tape when traveling, unable to accept last-minute bookings to perform—say, stepping in for a cancellation at a concert in Denmark—because he could not get a visa in time. (Adding to the frustration: Kaviani was born in Dubai and has never lived in Iran.) “I was almost living the life of a middle-aged lawyer, going out to whiskey bars and talking about interest rates,” he recalls. “I think the people with empathy saw just a kid who was trying to figure life out, probably very scared and very lonely, and someone who finds it difficult to find people to relate to, because I had a really fucking weird upbringing.”

The big difference between him and actual middle-aged lawyers? Money. As he studied for his postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Music in London and tried to carve out a career as a pianist, Kaviani was coming up short when paying his bills. “I had to put my entrepreneur hat on,” he says, “and do everything in my power to survive, using the skills I have.”

Kaviani was already chafing at the constraints of a typical performer, as keen to compose as to play. He’d found that music schools, though, emphasized the latter. “About 85 percent of musicians in a conservatory cannot improvise,” he says. “They haven’t learned to compose.”

Most of his peers embraced music that was solidly in the canon and, by definition, had been performed by greats for centuries—loosely speaking, like using modern paints to trace over an old master. He wanted to paint something wholly original instead. “A lot of classical music today is the Einsteinian definition of insanity, in the sense that it’s doing the same thing but expecting different results.”

Having moved to London, he was living in a tiny apartment in Knightsbridge, cobbling together an income via teaching and occasional performances, when Eckhard Pfeiffer and his wife made a life-changing commission. The former Compaq president had seen a teenage Kaviani perform and had never forgotten his talent; he’d followed the pianist’s career and in 2012 asked the musician to compose a piece for his son’s wedding. The groom was an avid violin player, and Kaviani wrote his first musical portrait for that celebration. “There were enough tears in the audience that I thought, ‘Maybe this is something,’ ” he recalls.

That “something” is now his signature creative expression: a five- to 12-minute composition, often similarly a pièce d’occasion, with a median price of about $30,000. He might sit down with a subject, portrait painter–style, and spend hours improvising riffs to see what appeals to them. He can also create a piece on spec, without ever meeting his subject, solely through the description of a loved one—a few words, perhaps, or a sense of their passions and interests. That was the case when a friend of Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth, and his wife, Emma, commissioned a work as a gift for the couple—two individual portraits that then united. The viscount was in on it, but the work was a surprise for Emma, a Nigerian billionaire’s daughter and fixture in London society who made headlines in Britain when she became the first Black marchioness. Kaviani premiered the composition for them in a private mini-concert at their home, Longleat House, in 2013. “She was in tears for 10 minutes and then said, ‘Can you play it again, and again and again?’ ” About a year later, he performed the piece at their anniversary party, which provided the perfect audience for Kaviani’s nascent business: Soon he was receiving similar requests from the Weymouths’ wealthy friends.

He has since built his clientele almost entirely through word of mouth, and briefs for pieces now go beyond simple portraits. One Monegasque businessman—a video-game and chess fanatic—asked Kaviani to turn a specific match between grand masters Magnus Carlsen and Vishy Anand into music. The composer responded in part by transposing the eight-by-eight chessboard onto the keyboard, with eight octaves on the piano, and devised an experimental score that notates the movement of various chess pieces to given squares on the board. Another recent commission came from a woman who asked Kaviani to compose a piece as a gift for her husband, a passionate opera buff. Yet another was a request from a fan of classical Chinese poetry to translate several poems and set them to original tunes. Some clients are content with sheet music, but others opt to have Kaviani press vinyl copies; one had him record a musical portrait for each family member as a Christmas gift. Some of the compositions are instrumental only, though he’ll write lyrics or set existing poems to music if asked. “I’ve done it with a calligraphic handwritten manuscript, too, that is scannable and will take you to a Dolby Atmos–produced immersive audio of it, and some people have even commissioned music videos to go with the piece,” he says. “There’s literally no limit to the presentation of it.”

Kaviani’s business as a composer for hire goes beyond one-off pieces, though. He likens Maison Musique Kaviani to a fashion house, with different product levels. Those one-of-a-kind commissions are the couture, but his creative equivalent of ready-to-wear is working with the likes of Charlotte Rossé, a Polish-born classically trained singer and songwriter who now lives in London. In the hopes of launching a pop career, she hired Kaviani to help her after dissatisfaction with other, better-known producers who’ve worked with the likes of Beyoncé and Alicia Keys but approached songwriting with a production-line efficiency. “It was so templated,” she laments. “If you’d said, ‘Can you play me Ravel or Debussy?’ they wouldn’t even know who that is.”

Rossé posted a help-wanted ad on the Soho House app, hoping to find a more collaborative creative partner, and Kaviani replied. “It’s never happened to me before, but we both speak the same musical language—we’re the black sheeps of classical music,” she says with a laugh.

There were enough tears in the audience that I thought, ‘Maybe this is something.’

Working together several days a week for six months, they cowrote all 11 songs on her upcoming album, The Golden Age of Melancholia. Rossé, who describes her style as poetic and eclectic, nodding to the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie, might come to the studio with fragments of lyrics and ideas, which Kaviani would nurture. “I can make such a difference to somebody’s musical confidence, unlocking something in them, and that’s one of the most worthwhile things,” he says.

It was Rossé’s partner, Monaco-based investor Luca Tenuta, who funded the enterprise. “I call [Kaviani] a maestro, because he has real talent and is so knowledgeable about music,” Tenuta raves. “And it’s worth every penny we’ve spent so far.” Kaviani has been completing the sheet music so that a producer can work with Rossé on the final recordings, aiming to release the album by summer.

Another string to Kaviani’s bow is cinematic scoring. He is working on the music for a new film by art- house director Anna Biller (The Love Witch), whose next movie, The Face of Horror, will be an adaptation of an 1825 kabuki play but set in medieval England. The two have had several sessions to determine the right sound. “I’m very hands-on with my scores,” Biller says. “I’ve worked with other composers, and it hasn’t ended up working out, because they have a more limited tool set. Sometimes the ego and defensiveness comes into play when the person doesn’t have the scope” to do what you’re asking. “Arsha has pristine taste,” she adds. They met when Biller and her husband, Robert Greene, an author he has known for years, came to town. Kaviani hosted a dinner party for the couple at his apartment in Kensington, with Persian food and his own particular parlor game. “He asked people to come up with six notes, and he would improvise and make a piece out of it, sitting down at his beautiful Steinway,” Biller recalls. “He was very charming, and everyone was completely enraptured.”

Indeed, Kaviani is winning company: He’s engaged, intense, but eager to please—the perfect modern courtier. He’s ambitious but also somewhat conflicted about the unusual career he has carved out. How do his parents—particularly that father who would diligently print out sheet music at the office—view what he’s doing? “As they’ve seen it work more and more and more, they’re much more at ease,” he says, pausing. “I think there’s a joke that an artist of Asian descent won an Oscar, or something like that, and a week later his mom was like, ‘When are you going to get an actual job?’ ”

To learn how to get a custom composition for yourself, head to The Vault by Robb Report to learn more.