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About
The Dutch tenor (former boy soprano), Marcel Beekman, has always enjoyed singing with the radio, at school, etc. At eight years old he performed at the kids song-festival. It was his first public performance. He won First Place with the song L'oiseau et l'enfant. After a request by the Tros (TV station) for the program 'Grand Gala des Enfants' he decided to apply and he was requested to perform. He continued to sing popular songs. Five singles were recorded and released, but he wasn't very pleased with the results.
After three years of piano lessons and two years of singing lessons from Frouke Vonk at the at the local music school, Marcel Beekman got involved with a classical repertoire which gave him much more satisfaction. By then he began receiving invitations from several choirs, the performance at the EO-show: "For you I Wanna Sing" in May 1982, the recordings of this LP, recorded in the Lutheren church in Den Hague and at the goal concerts in December. Currently living in Balkburg, he studied singing at the Conservatory of the Meander College in Zwolle. After concluding his vocal studies at conservatory with distinction in 1993, he was coached by the renowned voice teacher Margreet Honig in Amsterdam.
Marcel Beekman is a sought-after soloist in both the Baroque/Classical and the contemporary concert and opera repertoire. He has performed with such orchestras as the Berliner Symphoniker, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Münchner Philharmoniker, Musica Antiqua Köln, Schönberg Ensemble, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Orchestra of the 18th Century, Nederlandse Bachvereniging, Combattimento Consort Amsterdam, Gulbenkian Orchestra (Lisbon), Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto and with all the major Dutch orchestras, including the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Radio Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Residentie Orkest Den Haag.
Among the many conductors for whom Marcel Beekman has sung are Frans Brüggen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Yakov Kreizberg, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Ed Spanjaard, Kenneth Montgomery, Jaap van Zweden, Reinhard Goebel, Lev Markiz, Jurjen Hempel, David Porcelijn and Micha Hamel. He appears regularly at leading concert venues both national and international [Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, New York and Tokyo] and also at festivals in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Lithuania and Iran.
Marcel Beekman's broad concert repertoire includes the vocal works of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries, solo motets for high tenor by François Couperin, oratorios by George Frideric Handel, Haydn, W.A. Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, Rossini, Orff, Arthur Honegger and Igor Stravinsky, but also less well-known works such as Le Vin Herbé by Frank Martin, Dies Natalis by Gerald Finzi, Serenade and Nocturne by Benjamin Britten or Job by Peter Maxwell Davies, and extends to the more avant-garde work of composers such as Peter Schat, Claude Vivier or John Cage. Alongside these activities, Marcel Beekman, accompanied at the piano by Hans Adolfsen, can be heard in the entire range of traditional song repertoire, but focuses especially on contemporary song. In so doing he has sung the premières of many pieces [some of them written especially for him] by composers such as Roderik de Man, Martijn Padding, Jacques Bank, António Chagas Rosa, Myriam Marbe and Jeff Hamburg.
On the opera stage Marcel Beekman has appeared to date in Orfeo by C. Monteverdi [Pastore], Les Indes Galantes by Jean Philippe Rameau [Valère and Damon], Alceste by C.W. von Gluck [High Priest of Apollo and Apollo], Down in the valley by K. Weill [Brack Weaver], A season in hell, a quadripartite music theatre piece by Roderik de Man, Theo Abazis, Barbara Woof and Paul Bruinen [Arthur Rimbaud], Memory of Lake Taiping by Xu Shuya [Wu Zhengwen] and Jona by Willem Breuker [in the title role].