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, Prof. Beghin first taught at UCLA and since 2003 has been associate professor at McGill University. He also 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.  Beethoven and His Foreign Pianos is one of the cluster's current projects, of which Inside the Hearing Machine is the first major published result: a multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory exploration of a composer's deafly composing his three last Piano Sonatas, Opus 109, 110, and 111.

Tom Beghin performed in Early Music Festivals at Bruges, Utrecht, Paris, Berkeley, Palermo, Florence, and Montreal; participated in an epoch-making eight-concert series featuring all Beethoven sonatas on historical pianos in Merkin Hall, New York; concertized with acclaimed orchestras or ensembles such as the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin, Apollo-Ensemble, Arion, the Beethoven Academie, Caprice, and L’arpa festante (Münchener Barockorchester); teamed up with chamber music partners such as Les vents classiques du Québec, violinist Jaap Schröder, the Kuijken and Festetics String Quartets, violinist Anton Steck and cellist Markus Möllenbeck; is a member of Trio Galatea, with violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock and cellist Elisabeth Le Guin.  In the summer of 2006 he was the Festival Star at the Bruges Early Music Festival, performing. among others, Schubert’s Winterreise with tenor Jan van Elsacker, Haydn cantatas with soprano Olga Pasychnyk, and representing Mozart in a theatrical reconstruction of his 1781-competition against Clementi (with Erin Helyard, written by Robert J. Litz).

His discography on the Eufoda, Bridge Records, Claves, Klara/Et’cetera and EPR-Classic labels features keyboard music of Beethoven, Mozart, Moscheles, C.P.E. Bach, as well as songs by Haydn, Zelter and Mendelssohn (with Andrea Folan, soprano), and trios by Haydn and Clementi (with Trio Galatea).  His magnum opus, released on the Naxos label, is “The Virtual Haydn,” a recording of Haydn’s complete solo keyboard music, performed on seven different types of keyboards (some built especially for the project, for the first time in modern days) in nine different “virtual rooms” (for the first time applying technologies of “virtual acoustics” to a recording of this magnitude) in collaboration with two McGill colleagues, Tonmeister Martha de Francisco and virtual acoustics architect Wieslaw Woszczyk.  The project has recognized by the international press as “one of those truly rare occasions when, in several respects, new ground is being traversed” (BBC Music Magazine) and “one of the most audacious recording enterprises in recent memory” (blu-ray.com); it was chosen as “Multichannel Disc of the Month” (Audiophile Audition) and was up for a 2011 Juno for “Music DVD of the Year,” as the first classical music production to be nominated in this category.

As a scholar he has published in various distinguished journals and collections.  With classicist Sander Goldberg he has edited Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (Chicago, 2007), winner of the 2009 “Ruth A. Solie Award” from the American Musicological Society.  Recognized for his expertise in eighteenth-century performance he has given concerts, workshops and lectures at, among others, the Haydn Festival in Esterháza (Fertöd, Hungary), the Utrecht Conservatory, the Cologne Musikhochschule, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the Aula de Música in Alcalá, and the Kunstuniversität Graz.  In 2004 the Haydn-Institut of Cologne inducted him as a member.  He was elected Director-at-Large of the Haydn Society of North America (2010-12) and has been on the board of directors of CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, Montreal).

His research interests center around questions of 18th century & 19th century performance, the persona of the performer, rhetoric, aesthetics, social context, gender, the act of dedication, historical technology, virtual acoustics, and modern-day interpretation.  He is presently applying these perspectives to the study of Beethoven’s piano works.

Tom Beghin studied at the Lemmens Institute in Louvain, Belgium (with Alan Weiss), at the Musik-Akademie in Basel, Switzerland (with Rudolf Buchbinder and Jean Goverts), and received his doctoral degree with Malcolm Bilson and James Webster from Cornell University (Ithaca, New York).  After serving on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (1997-2003), and residing at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) as its “William J. Bouwsma Fellow” (2002-03), he became Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University (Montreal, Canada), where he teaches music history, performance practice, and fortepiano.  Since 2015 he has also been Senior Researcher at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium).

Links:

The Virtual Salon, excerpt from live@CIRMMT concert, February 4, 2012

Tom Beghin demystifies Beethoven's piano technology:

"Pathétique" Sonata and the back-check

"Mondschein" Sonata and the undamped register

Schubert's Winterreise:

Rückblick - Der Lindenbaum - Auf dem Flusse - Der Leiermann