Orhan Memed, harpsichord: A Musical Banquet – 150 years of English keyboard music

• Orhan Mehmed, harpsichord

What better way to celebrate the inimitable William Byrd (1540–1623) than by presenting a program that puts his music in the context of the great tradition of keyboard music from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. From the earliest piece for a plucked keyboard instrument dating from the 1540s through to the majestic suites of Henry Purcell, the contrapuntal rigor of the English is always present, along with that certain quirkiness that charms us so.

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About Orhan Mehmed, harpsichord

Orhan Memed has lived in Rome since 2016. After piano and violin studies in the United States at the University of Southern California, and a doctorate in musicology at the University of Oxford, he moved to Paris to study the harpsichord with Huguette Dreyfus. Paris was his adopted city for over 20 years.

While beginning a performing career in the early 90’s, Orhan Memed was named editor then managing director at Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre. His own published research encompasses early English keyboard music, eighteenth-century French vocal music, and Macedonian folk music. He has most recently edited the complete keyboard works of Benjamin Cosyn for Musica Britannica. He has taught courses on the history of music and the history of opera for the Vassar College-Wesleyan University Program in Paris (1998–2008) and at the United Nations agency of the FAO since 2019.

In 1999 he was named Artistic Director of the Académie musicale de Villecroze in the south of France where he directed and organized masterclasses, composition workshops, and musicological colloquia for over ten years. Orhan Memed is producer and author of several documentary films on artists including Christa Ludwig, Betsy Jolas, Keiko Abe, and Jessye Norman. His recordings on harpsichord include Bach's Goldberg Variations (2011), the Partitas (2013), the Toccatas (2016), and a collection of English music, A Musical Banquet (2020). Haydn & Mozart (2017) was his first solo piano recording, followed by Bach Partitas 342 (2017), Scarlatti Sonatas (2020), and Haydn & Debussy (2022).