Pablo Esquivel

At age seven, Pablo Esquivel saw the film August Rush, in which an orphan boy wins a place at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York, and he told his parents he would do the same. At 10, Pablo became the first Central American to be admitted to Juilliard to train in piano. Before he left his lush Costa Rican home, Pablo won a competition to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra. He subsequently performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre in New York, and at the Mercedes Benz Arena in Berlin. Then, Pablo dived into composition at the Mannes School of Music in New York, guided by Missy Mazzoli. All the while impacted by the writings of Erich Fromm in The Fear of Freedom, as well as Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, and supported by his mentor, Pablo subsequently embarked on a search for meaning and identity. In 2024, the 25-year-old composer and pianist updated the contemporary classical genre with the deeply moving and cinematic EP, Logo, (“meaning” in Greek). With his new EP, Being of a Flower, Pablo strips back to piano solos. This time, it is Eckhart Tolle’s take on mindfulness that helped him reach further for the freedom of improvisation, exploration and discovery. Pablo was able to have a taste of this in February 2025, spellbinding the audience with an immersive performance combining his music with intelligent technologies and neuroscience at the Grand Rex in Paris during the AI Summit.