TOM beghin
Tom Beghin, a leading fortepianist and artistic researcher, has been praised for his eloquence and originality. With classicist Sander Goldberg he coedited Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, winner of the 2009 American Musicological Society Ruth A. Solie Award. His monograph The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (University of Chicago Press, 2015) followed his monumental recording of the complete solo Haydn (Naxos 2009/2011). An alumnus of the historically informed performance doctoral program at Cornell University, Tom first taught at UCLA and since 2003 has been associate professor at McGill University. He currently is the principal investigator of a research cluster at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, titled Declassifying the Classics, which focuses on the intersections of historical technologies and performance.
Martha de francisco
Martha de Francisco is associate professor of sound recording at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In her prominent international career of over thirty years as a record producer and engineer for classical music, Martha has developed long-lasting working relationships with many distinguished soloists, singers, and conductors, including Alfred Brendel, Jessye Norman, Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner, and symphony orchestras and music festivals such as those in Vienna, Philadelphia, and Bayreuth, Germany. Her recordings have received numerous major awards. A pioneer of digital editing in the 1980s, Martha has led innovative research projects in music performance, virtual acoustics, auditory analysis, and multichannel recording.
Chris Maene
Chris Maene is an internationally renowned instrument maker. Having trained in the piano workshop of his parents in Ruiselede, Belgium, he currently leads a keyboard-building workshop that employs more than ten specialized craftsmen. An avid collector of antique keyboard instruments, Chris brings his interest in harpsichords, fortepianos, and concert grands to his Ruiselede workshop. He has built replicas of the Steinway No. 1 Kitchen Piano (1836), a Pleyel Concert Grand (1843), and most recently Beethoven’s 1803 Erard. In 2015 he designed and built the internationally acclaimed Maene-Barenboim straight-strung concert grand. Chris is associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute, where he is a driving force in the cluster project Beethoven and His Foreign Pianos.
steven Maes
Steven Maes has been experimenting with sound tools for the past twenty-five years, using everything from lamp microphones to 360 video and Ambisonic immersive sound technology. Passionate about classical music, he has directed television programs, made hundreds of recordings, and mastered CDs for popular music artists from Adamo to Lost Frequencies. His recordings have been praised in BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone, and his DVD 392 (on Pieter Wispelwey’s recording of the Bach Cello Suites) was met with great acclaim. Classica selected his recording of Debussy’s La Mer (Brussels Philharmonic) as the best reference of all time. Steven is on faculty at PXL University College in Hasselt, Belgium, where he supervises thesis projects and teaches studio technique.
Robin Wallace
Robin Wallace is professor of musicology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is an authority on the critical reception of the music of Beethoven and the author of the textbook Take Note: An Introduction to Music through Active Listening. His new book on Beethoven’s deafness, to be released in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press, draws on Robin’s life with his late wife, Barbara, who lost her hearing in her later years; her experiences and Beethoven’s inform each other in often surprising ways that expand our understanding of musical creativity.
Thomas Wulfrank
Thomas Wulfrank studied engineering and acoustics at Ghent University in Belgium, the Technical University of Denmark, and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Since 2006, he has been acoustician and associate at Kahle Acoustics in Brussels, working on a wide range of performing arts building projects with renowned architects and artists, including the Curve Theatre in Leicester, UK; the new Philharmonie de Paris; the concert hall for contemporary music Arsonic in Mons, Belgium; the new concert hall and opera hall of the Shandong Grand Theatre in Jinan, China, and the Cathedral of the Northern Lights in Alta, Norway.