Samuel Van de Velde

At the age of five, Samuel discovered his passion for the piano, and at the age of ten, he was admitted as one of the youngest students ever to the class of world-renowned pianists Abdel Rahman El Bacha and Dimitris Saroglou at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.
He has performed at numerous festivals, including Musicorum, the Festival of Flanders, the Chopin Festival at Flagey, Pianofest, ECAL International, Lions Club, AMUZ, the Brescia International Festival, the Arte Amanti International Festival, the Nagoldtal International Festival, and many others. Samuel has given concerts in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, and France, performing at venues such as La Monnaie, Bozar, Flagey, the Blue Hall at deSingel, the Henry Le Bœuf Hall, the Royal Castle of Laeken, Schloss Blumendorf, Alden Biesen, and elsewhere.
As a soloist, Samuel has won the National Cantabile Competition (Antwerp, 2009 and 2012), twice, and the National Piano Competition of Namur (Namur, 2009). He was also a finalist in the EPTA International Piano Competition for Young Pianists (Waterloo, 2015). In addition, he won second and third prizes at the Rotary Breughel Competition (Brussels, 2010 and 2014). In 2015, he won first prize at the Belfius Classics Competition and performed Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto at La Monnaie with the Prima la Musica Orchestra, conducted by Dirk Vermeulen. At the Stéphan Dejonghe National Competition (Aalst, 2022), he also won first prize.

In 2019, Samuel obtained his Master of Arts in Piano at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, studying with Jan Michiels. In 2020, he continued his studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in the class of Christine Karajeva. In 2023, he graduated with a specialized master’s degree in piano from the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, where he studied with Aleksandar Madžar.
In 2021, the Royal Conservatory of Brussels awarded Samuel the Horlait-Dapsens Prize, followed in 2023 by the same institution’s Maurice Lefrancq Special Prize.
Among Samuel’s teachers are internationally renowned artists such as Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden, Markus Groh, Lars Vogt, Bernd Goetzke, Alfredo Perl, Dimitri Bashkirov, Christopher Elton, Boris Berman, Lukas Genuisas, and Jérôme Lowenthal.