Jozef De Beenhouwer

From 1990 until 2015 he was the artistic director of the Brussels Lunchtime Concerts.

For ten years (1986–1996) Jozef De Beenhouwer was an official accompanist at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition for violin and singing.

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 until 2020 he continued as a guest professor, teaching, together with the mezzo-soprano Lucienne Van Deyck, the course of Art Songs (a term of which was devoted to German Lieder).

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.

Jozef De Beenhouwer (born March 26, 1948 in Brasschaat, Belgium) is a Belgian pianist, music teacher and musicologist.

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 (world premiere 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 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). 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.