ANHAD
ARORA

Performance

Anhad straddles the worlds of musicology and performance. As a continuo player, he has appeared with some of the country’s foremost groups, including the Academy of Ancient Music, the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Instruments of Time and Truth, 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.

As a concerto soloist, he has appeared with the Adderbury Ensemble (Handel’s Organ Concertos) and the Chamber Orchestra of the West (Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto). Recent recital highlights include performing Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord with Henrik Persson and six of Bach’s ‘manualiter’ toccatas (BWV 911–916) in a specially curated series for the Oxford Bach Soloists from May to July 2025. Forthcoming recitals include a solo debut at St Martin in the Fields in July 2026.

Interested in historical instruments from a young age, Anhad 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 privately with James Johnstone, while holding both an undergraduate academic scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and the repetiteur scholarship with New Chamber Opera.

Research

Anhad’s academic work centres on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German musical and literary culture. Having obtained a first-class Bachelor’s degree in Music and a Master’s degree with Distinction in Musicology from Oxford, Anhad completed his doctorate at Merton College in the summer of 2025, with a thesis that explores the intermedial phenomenon of Orientalism in German song through a reception history of two collections of poetry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West- östlicher Divan (publ. 1819) and Heinrich Stieglitz’s Bilder des Orients (publ. 4 vols, 1831–1833).

Anhad’s doctoral work was fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Clarendon Fund. During his doctorate, he also 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 in 2022–2023, 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). His thesis will soon be available for download from ORA, the Oxford University Research Archive.