Jozef De Beenhouwer


Jozef De Beenhouwer is a Belgian pianist, music teacher and musicologist.

Biography

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, 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 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. But his international reputation rests mainly on his Schumann expertise. Basing himself on Robert Schumann's autograph, whose pages, besides being hard to read, had also been wrongly bound, he managed to reconstruct and complete an unfinished Concertsatz in D minor, dated 1839. He completed and orchestrated a Konzertsatz in F minor by Clara Schumann. He was the first to record all of Clara Schumann's works for piano solo. He is now regularly invited to be a member of the jury of the International Robert Schumann Competition for Piano, and occasionally of other international piano competitions as well.
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 When these have remained unpublished he deciphers them from the manuscript and sometimes ends up publishing them himself.
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 and he was also in charge of a chamber music course at the conservatory until 2013, when he reached the mandatory retirement age. But as a guest professor he remains, with the mezzo-soprano Lucienne Van Deyck, in charge of the course of Art Songs.
From 1990 until 2015 he was the artistic director of the Brussels Lunchtime Concerts.
Besides in music, 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.

Prizes and Honors