Musician and mathematician born in Enghien (Belgium), Laurent Beeckmans is a multi-faceted figure. As teacher, pianist, conductor, composer or arranger, he is continuously tackling numerous projects and explorating new directions with the desire to break down the barriers between the different musical styles.
He began studying piano and percussion at the music schools of Enghien and Forest and developed further at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in the piano classes of Evgeny Moguilevsky. He graduated also in the fields of accompaniment, chamber music, music theory, musical analysis and music history. Besides his music apprenticeship, Laurent Beeckmans studied also mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England).
He is mainly a chamber musician, but performs also as a soloist in a repertoire focused on French, English and Nordic composers. Among them, Grieg deserve a special attention, since Laurent Beeckmans organised in 2007 the Belgian Grieg Festival that resulted in 20 concerts in Brussels and Ghent. Fascinated by the repertoire for 4 hands, he forms with Pieter Dhoore the Mahler Piano Duo that performs mainly arrangements and transcriptions of orchestral works.
He arranged a big amount of works, mainly for two pianos (works by Bernstein, Borodin, Copland, Mahler, Poulenc, Bridge, Vaughan Williams...) and also for ensembles from 2 to 8 pianos intended for the Pianofolies show, that was part of the annual Feast of Music in Brussels between 1999 and 2007. This resulted in the creation of Geyser Music, an ensemble of pianists performing in thematic concerts mixing sound and image by the use of multimedia environment.
As a composer, Laurent Beeckmans as written some piano compositions (Danses dans le mode de si, Sonatine, Piano Sonata, Variations on the name of GRIEG), a Suite for Organ and the Concerto for piano and orchestra in B minor, from fragments of an unfinished piano concerto by Edvard Grieg that was created in London in 2003 and performed at the Saarbrücken Festival Nordische Musik in 2007. In 2003, The Rainbow for choir a cappella and the oratorio Dona Nobis Pacem for choir and wind ensemble were nominated in international competitions for composers.
Laurent Beeckmans teaches at present musical theory and analysis at the Music Chapel Queen Elisabeth and is conductor of the youth orchestra Melomania and the chamber orchestra of the European School in Brussels.
