Lorenzo Gatto & Julien Libeer

• Lorenzo Gatto (violin)

Born in Brussel in 1986, Lorenzo Gatto started playing the violin at the age of five with Dirk van de Moortel. At eleven years old, he entered the Brussels Royal Conservatoire of Music in the class of Veronique Bogaerts, where he graduated at only seventeen with the highest honour. He then studied with Herman Krebbers in the Netherlands, Augustin Dumay at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium and he finishes his academic journey by studying for four years with Boris Kuschnir in Vienna. His hard work and determination were handsomely rewarded as he won both the Second Prize and the Audience Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2009. In 2015, Lorenzo started collaborating with the talented Belgian pianist Julien Libeer. Together, they recorded all of Beethoven’s sonatas and released an album that won a 2016 Diapason d’Or Award. Lorenzo Gatto plays the ‘Joachim’ Stradivari from 1698.

• Julien Libeer (piano)

Born in 1987 near Brussels, Belgium, Julien Libeer has studied with Daniel Blumenthal (Royal Conservatory of Brussels), Jean Fassina (Paris) and Maria João Pires, and is an associate artist of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, where he also specialized in chamber music with the members of the Artemis Quartet. Julien is driven to initiate or collaborate in projects which are rooted in the idea that music, far beyond its aesthetic value, can be a force of change for anyone willing to listen. Amongst these projects was Julien hosting a Belgian TV series, that made a case for musical storytelling. In addition he hosts the Salon Libeer concert series at the Bruges Concertgebouw, in which he joins a fellow musician and a speaker (e.g. philosopher, historian, author), as well as the lecture series Dead or Alive, a philosophical exploration of the shifts in classical music making (in collaboration with LUCA School of Arts and the Catholic University of Leuven. As the artistic director of the Singing Molenbeek project, he supervises high level choir rehearsals in the primary schools of a Brussels suburb. It is Julien’s hope that introducing these children to music, with all its demands and rewards, will help them grow personally and socially.