Photo Gerard Collett
Keval Shah has quickly established himself at the forefront of a new generation of collaborative pianists. Since 2020, he has been Lecturer of Lied at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, an appointment which made him the institution’s youngest professor, and he now divides his time between running the Academy’s Lied programme and appearing in recital at venues and festivals across Europe, as well as maintaining an increasingly busy schedule as a guest teacher, artistic curator and broadcaster.
Away from the concert platform, Shah regularly presents programmes on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. In Spring 2022, he hosted a three-part series on song and chamber music, titled ‘The Art of Accompaniment’, and most recently he presented a documentary about the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho for the BBC World Service. Shah is the founder and artistic director of the Sibelius Academy’s Soiva Kieli recital series, and curator of Lied recitals at Helsinki Seriös, Finland’s premier international chamber music series. In June 2024, Keval will sit on the jury of the Mirjam Helin competition, the first pianist to be invited to join the jury in the competition’s history.
In addition to teaching at the Sibelius Academy, Shah has taught at the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, and the Academy of Music and Opera at Mälardalen University, Sweden. This season he returns to the Norwegian Academy of Music for a series of Lied masterclasses, and will be a guest artist at the Juilliard School, New York.