Jozef De Beenhouwer | |
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| Background information | |
| Born | 26 March 1948 Brasschaat, Belgium |
| Instrument(s) | piano |
Jozef De Beenhouwer (born 26 March 1948 in Brasschaat, Belgium) is a Belgian pianist, music teacher and musicologist.
Jozef De Beenhouwer | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 26 March 1948 Brasschaat, Belgium |
| Instrument(s) | piano |
Jozef De Beenhouwer (born 26 March 1948 in Brasschaat, Belgium) is a Belgian pianist, music teacher and musicologist.
His first teacher, with whom he started at the age of five, was his paternal grandfather. Even as a child and adolescent, he became acquainted with a vast repertoire, and developed a special preference for music by Robert Schumann. In 1964 he began studying with Lode Backx, at first privately; later, after graduating from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as a pharmacist (1970), at the Queen Elisabeth College of Music at Waterloo, from which he graduated in 1974, and at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, which granted him the “Hoger Diploma”, its highest degree, summa cum laude in 1975. Another major influence on Jozef De Beenhouwer was David Kimball, with whom he took private lessons in Florence between 1991 and 1998.
As a soloist, both in works for piano solo and in works with orchestra, he has played concerts and made radio and television recordings in many European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and the Czech Republic,) in South-Korea and in the United States. He has accompanied singers such as Ria Bollen, Nina Stemme, Robert Holl, and Werner Van Mechelen. As a chamber musician, he has played with Belgian musicians including the clarinetist Walter Boeykens, the pianist Daniel Blumenthal, the violinist Guido Deneve, the violist Leo Deneve, the cellist Edmond Baeyens, the Spiegel Quartet, as well as with international partners such as the violinists Ning Kam and Alexander Kramarov, the violist Hartmut Lindemann, the cellist Marien van Staalen, and the Panocha Quartet. With Kees Hülsmann and Marien van Staalen he forms the Robert Schumann Trio.
For ten years (1986–1996) Jozef De Beenhouwer was an official accompanist at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition for violin and singing.
He is a regular guest of the Brahms Festival at Mürzzuschlag, Austria.
Jozef De Beenhouwer's recordings include works by Johannes Brahms, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schubert, and by the German romantic composer Ludwig Schuncke, whose G minor sonata he was the first to perform. His international reputation rests mainly on his Schumann expertise. He managed to reconstruct and complete an unfinished Concertsatz in D minor dated 1839, drawing on Robert Schumann's autograph, whose pages, besides being hard to read, had also been wrongly bound. The world premiere took place in Vienna, 1986, with the Vienna Symphony conducted by Peter Gülke. He completed and orchestrated a Konzertsatz in F minor by Clara Schumann (world premiere in Zwickau, 1986, with the orchestra of the Theater of Zwickau conducted by Albrecht Hofmann). He was the first to record all of Clara Schumann's works for piano solo (three CDs with the label cpo). He serves regularly as a member of the jury of the International Robert Schumann Competition for Piano, and occasionally for other international piano competitions.
Jozef De Beenhouwer is also an ardent champion of music by Belgian, especially Flemish, composers, whose works he plays and records regularly. When these have remained unpublished he deciphers them from the manuscript and sometimes ends up publishing them himself; see the bibliography and discography below.)
On tour in the US, Jozef De Beenhouwer has played a number of concerts as a soloist and with the violinist Janet Packer, and their programs have all featured American composers, such as Irving Fine, Amy Beach, Gardner Read, Andrew Imbrie and Vittorio Rieti.
Jozef De Beenhouwer succeeded his teacher Lode Backx as a professor of piano at the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Antwerp in 1983. he was also in charge of a chamber music course at the conservatory until 2013, when he reached the mandatory retirement age. Until 2020, he continued as a guest professor, teaching, together with the mezzo-soprano Lucienne Van Deyck, the course of Art Songs, term of which was devoted to German Lieder.
From 1990 until 2015 he was the artistic director of the Brussels Lunchtime Concerts.
Jozef De Beenhouwer is also interested in literature and in painting. His knowledge of literature, particularly of German Romanticism, stands him in good stead in his Schumann studies and in his Art Song class. And he has published the standard monograph on the Belgian-Dutch painter Henry Luyten as well as a book on that painter's school.
Johannes Brahms was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born to a musical family in Hamburg, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He wrote for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus, including four symphonies, four concertos, one requiem, and many Lieder. Brahms is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music.
Clara Josephine Schumann was a German pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era, she exerted her influence over the course of a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital by lessening the importance of purely virtuosic works. She also composed solo piano pieces, a piano concerto, chamber music, choral pieces, and songs.
Joseph Joachim was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher who made an international career, based in Hanover and Berlin. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.
The Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44, by Robert Schumann was composed in 1842 and received its first public performance the following year. Noted for its "extroverted, exuberant" character, Schumann's piano quintet is considered one of his finest compositions and a major work of nineteenth-century chamber music. Composed for piano and string quartet, the work revolutionized the instrumentation and musical character of the piano quintet and established it as a quintessentially Romantic genre.
Murray David Perahia is an American pianist and conductor. He has been considered one of the greatest living pianists. He was the first North American pianist to win the Leeds International Piano Competition, in 1972. Known as a leading interpreter of Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, among other composers, Perahia has won numerous awards, including three Grammy Awards from a total of 18 nominations, and 9 Gramophone Awards in addition to its first and only "Piano Award".
Hélène Rose Paule Grimaud is a French classical pianist and the founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York.
Solomon Cutner was a British pianist known professionally as Solomon.
Ruth Laredo was an American classical pianist.
Richard Goode is an American classical pianist who is especially known for his interpretations of Mozart and Beethoven.
Edgar Pierre Joseph Tinel was a Belgian composer and pianist.
Leonard Borwick was an English concert pianist especially associated with the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.
Lars Vogt was a German classical pianist, conductor and academic teacher. Noted by The New York Times for his interpretations of Brahms, Vogt performed as a soloist with major orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic. He was the music director of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris at the time of his death and also served as the music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia. He ran a festival of chamber music, Spannungen, from 1998, and succeeded his teacher Karl-Heinz Kämmerling as professor of piano at the Musikhochschule Hannover.
Leonard Hokanson was an American pianist who achieved prominence in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician.
Ernest Jozef Leo van der Eyken was a Belgian composer, conductor and violist.
Ignace Michiels is a Belgian organist, choral conductor and organ teacher. He is internationally known as a concert organist.
Phaedra is a CD label whose aim it is "to publish works written between 1830 and the present by Flemish composers, and to promote them world-wide". The label used to be a subdivision of "Klassieke Concerten vzw" and was therefore not a commercial undertaking: as it was a subdivision of a "vzw", an association without lucrative purpose, Belgian law forbade it to make a profit.
The Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14, called "Concerto for piano without orchestra" by Tobias Haslinger, was composed by Robert Schumann in 1836 and dedicated to Ignaz Moscheles, to whom in a letter he comments "what crazy inspirations one can have". Liszt believed that the work was rich and powerful. In 1853 Schumann revised the work and added a Scherzo as a second movement, which the performer could choose to play, or not play. In 1861 it was released into the hands of Johannes Brahms.
Joachim Draheim is a German musicologist, music teacher and classical pianist.
Ria Bollen is a Flemish contralto, who had an international career as a concert singer between 1965 and 1992. Her broad repertoire included Bach's Passions, Mozart's Requiem, Beethoven's Missa solemnis, especially works by Gustav Mahler and works of the 20th century. She was the soloist in the world premiere of Frank Martin's Requiem. She sang many art songs, including by Belgian composers.
Günter Ludwig was a German pianist.
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