Jeroen Berwaerts

Belgian trumpeter Jeroen Berwaerts is a musical force to be reckoned with whose all-embracing love of music knows no genre boundaries. Praised for his outstanding technical capabilities and sensitive musicality, his repertoire encompasses every epoch, from baroque to contemporary music and jazz.

He has appeared as a soloist with leading orchestras including the NHK Symphony, Vienna Symphony, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, NDR Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre Philharmoniques of Strasbourg and Luxembourg, under conductors such as Alan Gilbert, Yakov Kreizberg, Jun Märkl and Matthias Pintscher. He is a regular guest of internationally renowned music festivals including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Niedersächsische Musiktage, Takefu International Music Festival in Japan, Ars Musica in Belgium, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Rheingau Musik Festival.

Placing the standard repertoire for trumpet in ingenious programmes and unusual contexts has become Jeroen Berwaerts’ calling card. One such programme places Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and dances from Rameau’s opera Dardarus alongside chansons by Jacques Brel. The singing part in such programmes is generally taken by Jeroen Berwaerts himself, who has completed jazz vocal studies at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent alongside his active career as a trumpeter.

Jeroen Berwaerts’ extraordinary commitment to contemporary music is evident in the numerous premieres he has given, including Toshio Hosokawa’s second trumpet concerto Im Nebel and Francesco Filidei’s Carnevale. After Håkan Hardenberger he was the second trumpeter worldwide to add HK Gruber’s Busking (2007) to his repertoire. Following the high praise he received at the Musikfest Hamburg and the Bregenz Festival in 2014, this season he will perform Busking with the Bochum Symphony and the German Philharmonic Orchestra Rhineland-Palatinate.

Elsewhere in the 2017/18 season he will give performances of Péter Eötvös’ Jet Stream and Snatches of a Conversation with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Toshio Hosokawa’s Voyage VII with the Ensemble Resonanz at the Budapest Spring Festival. He will be joined by pianist Boris Giltburg for Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Orchestra with the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi – a work he will return to later this season with his long-standing chamber music partner Alexander Melnikov, together with the Swedish Dala Sinfonietta and the Finnish Tapiola Sinfonietta.

In 2017, Jeroen Berwaerts’ discography was complemented by the album Signals from Heaven, recorded with Salaputia Brass, with whom he is trumpeter, jazz-vocalist and ensemble director. His recording of Paul Hindemith’s trumpet sonata with Alexander Melnikov was released on Harmonia Mundi in 2015. He has already recorded Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Orchestra under Teodor Currentzis with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra which was released in 2012, the same year as his recording of Toshio Hosokawa’s Voyage VII with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg.

Jeroen Berwaerts studied in Karlsruhe with the celebrated trumpet-virtuoso Reinhold Friedrich. Since 2008, he has been a Professor of Trumpet at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover. He is an official Yamaha Artist.

2017/18 season

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