Els Biesemans & Meret Lüthi
Biographie Els Biesemans & Meret Lüthi
Els Biesemans
was born in Antwerp in 1978, and studied piano, organ and chamber music at the Belgian Conservatory in Leuven. In 2001 she was awarded a Master of Music with Honours. In 2005 Andrea Marcon, recognizing that she was a great artist, invited her to continue her studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis where she specialized in 18th- and 19th-century keyboard music under Jesper Christensen.
Her love of period instruments emerged at an early age. She began playing the organ at seven and soon learned to adapt to new instruments and changing acoustic conditions. She developed a deep relationship with instruments built to withstand the test of time and to outlast many generations. This experience sharpened her ear and laid the foundations for a lively, complex keyboard technique that is essential for playing period instruments.
Els Biesemans has won countless international competitions in Bruges, Paris, Prague, Tokyo and Montreal, winning the Ciurlionis Competition in Vilnius and the ‘Arp Schnitger’ competition in Bremen. She has performed as a solo artist all over Europe, in the U.S., Canada and Japan and has regularly appeared on stage in concert halls such as the Philharmonie Berlin, the Philharmonie Essen, the Tonhalle Zürich, the Salle Philharmonique Liège, the BOZAR in Brussel and AMUZ in Antwerp, Philharmonie Ekaterinburg and Omsk, Maison de la Radio France in Paris and in the Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao.
Her musical partners include the singers Julian Prégardien, Christian Immler, violin players Chouchane Siranossian and Mayumi Harasaki, as well as the orchestra La Cetra, conducted by Andrea Marcon.
Together with her Ensemble Elsewhere, Els Biesemans has continuously expanded her repertoire, focusing in particular on music that has sunk into oblivion. Her love for forgotten music inspired the first-ever recording on CD of Franz Xaver Sterkel’s violin and piano sonatas (released in 2017).
An overwhelmingly positive press response greeted her CD recordings of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn’s «Das Jahr» piano suite (issued by Genuin in 2012) and of the Liszt transcriptions of Franz Schubert’s «Winterreise» song cycle (issued by Genuin in 2014), pieces that she played for the first time ever on a period piano. Further recordings of symphonic organ music such as the complete organ works of Maurice Duruflé round off her discography.
Els Biesemans often plays her own instruments during her concert tours. Her private collection includes a Brodmann grand (c. 1825), an 1836 Pleyel grand, a square piano from 1851 by Pleyel as well as a reproduction of an early Viennese piano (1805) built by Paul McNulty. She lives with her family of instruments in Zurich where she founded a fortepiano festival called “Flügelschläge”, directing it with great dedication.
