Daan Vandewalle, pianist
© Daan Vandewalle
The pianist Daan Vandewalle is an internationally acclaimed performer of 20th and 21st century piano music.
His repertoire consists of hundreds of pieces, integrales of most of the well-known composers of the 20th century such as Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, as well as numerous premières that resulted from intense collaborations with composers of today. He has performed in a wide range of venues, from small clubs in the underground experimental music scene to established venues such as the Prague Spring festival, the Lincoln Centre in New York or Théâtre des Châtelets in Paris.
Special projects include his life-long collaboration with the American composer Alvin Curran which resulted in a series of 6-hour marathon performances of the piano cycle Inner Cities, a series that was released on a Long Distance classics/harmonia Mundi cd box (2005). Other recording projects included the complete piano music of Gordon Mumma (2008 NWR) and his debut recording of the Ives Concord sonata (1996) which was met with rave reviews in the American press. He premièered dozens of new pieces, for example, by Frederic Rzewski, Clarence Barlowe, Maria De Alvear, Fred Frith and Gordon Mumma. He is one of the only pianists in the world who play the entire Opus Clavicembalisticum by Sorabji and the extremely complex Çogluotobüsisletmesi by Clarence Barlowe.
Apart from his work as a soloist he forms a piano-duo with the legendary Australian pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge and with Belgian’s new music cello virtuoso Arne Deforce.
Recent projects include a large production with the Zoo dance company in which he performed Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for piano, a performance as soloist in Ligeti’s piano concerto at Carnegie Hall in the spring of 2011 with the SEM ensemble conducted by Petr Kotik and the performance of the entire piano works of the Canadian composer Marc Sabat.
Since 2001 he teaches piano at the conservatory of Ghent, University of Ghent College.
Further information can be found on the artist’s webpage: www.daanvandewalle.com