Lucas Blondeel, born in Brussels in 1981, began playing at the age of four on an early 19th century fortepiano that was for sale in his parents' antique shop. A scholarship holder of the German Foundation for Musical Life and the German National Academic Foundation, he has won prizes at international competitions in Antwerp, Geneva, Zurich, Berlin and Cincinatti and has performed on various stages throughout Europe, the United States, China, Singapore and Japan. He has recorded for numerous German and foreign radio and television stations. From 2012 to 2018, he taught a piano major class at the Akademie für Tonkunst Darmstadt. In April 2018, he was appointed Professor of Piano at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he has also been teaching fortepiano since 2020.

About the programme
"Anyone who knows me thoroughly must realise that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I have understood him and studied him diligently." With this sentence, Joseph Haydn is referring to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was much more famous at the time than his father Johann Sebastian. The musical proximity, indeed kinship, of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Joseph Haydn - and thus also the exciting transition from the pre-classical period to the so-called Viennese Classical period - is at the centre of this concert and thus also points to the time of composition of the piano sonata that is so important today.

Lucas Blondeel plays on a replica of a fortepiano by Johann Andreas Stein (around 1780) from the workshop of Rainer Sprung.