A once-prominent instrument gradually fell quiet for about a century, resigned to the duties of a refashioned desk. As the piano gained widespread popularity in the 19th century, its precursor, the ...

Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani performs a recital at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Wednesday. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) The audience was small. The slight keyboard instrument painted green ...

The acclaimed Iranian-American musician is rekindling enthusiasm for an often derided instrument – and he’s not done yet Mahan Esfahani was nine when he first heard a harpsichord. He and his parents ...

On my dining table there are a few random scraps of homework for a lesson that never happened. The scraps include sheets of music paper on which I wrote out the first scene of the first act of ...

Working in his studio, Kevin Fryer listens to CDs of lute and harpsichord music, letting his thoughts sail away to the Dutch masters and places like Antwerp in the 17th century. In a second-story ...

For many, the harpsichord conjures images of cobwebbed mansions (The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes) or the iconic theme song of the Addams family. Justin Luchinski, harpsichordist and ...

"The harpsichord is an easy target, isn't it?" Those are the fighting words of Mahan Esfahani, a good-humored harpsichordist who is a proud defender of his instrument. Esfahani sat down to talk with ...

There are labors of love, and then there’s this story. In the late 1980s, woodworker Gregory Bover decided to build a pretty incredible gift for his wife, Frances Fitch, an internationally known ...

This is the fourth in a series of posts about appreciating classical music. Catch up on the first three parts of the series here, here and here. Though its name sounds archaic, the harpsichord is a ...