Biography (read more)
Jos van Immerseel was born in Antwerp on 9 November 1945 and studied organ, piano and harpsichord at the Royal Conservatoire there under Flor Peeters, Eugène Traey and Kenneth Gilbert. Founder of the Collegium Musicum and later of the orchestra Anima Eterna, he built a unique collection of period keyboards and became one of Europe’s leading fortepianists, praised especially for his improvised cadenzas.
Immerseel’s recordings put the fortepiano’s case at its strongest: Mozart and Beethoven concertos on instruments the composers knew, with rhetoric and articulation in place of sustained wash. In this catalogue his readings are the historical counter-voice — hearing his Beethoven against a modern grand is the shortest lesson in what a century of instrument-building changed.
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