Pieter Theuns
As a child, he took piano and violin lessons but only started playing the guitar in a rock band, self-taught, when he was 15 years old. Later on, he studied the guitar with Beatrice Vanderlinden and Aram Van Ballaert, and spent a year studying at the Antwerp Jazzstudio. In 1998 he started studying classical guitar at the Lemmens Instituut in Leuven. It was during his studies at this institute that his interest in early music and the lute repertoire was awakened. This is why he chose to play an unusual instrument, the eight-string guitar, which it is better-suited to playing transcriptions taken from lute tablature. In 2002 he was awarded his master’s diploma studying with Raphaëlla Smits. In 2004 he entered the Royal Conservatory in Brussels to study the theorbo; a fourteen-stringed member of the lute family. In 2006 he was awarded his bachelor’s diploma studying with PhilippeMalfeyt. During the last year of this program he stayed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for two months, where he took lessons from the renowned lutenist and guitarist Gabriel Schebor and performed several times with the ensemble La Spiritata under Marcelo Dutto and with students of the Conservatorio Nacional Manuel de Falla de Buenos Aires. After he completed his studies, he was asked to participate in an international opera production for young talent, the Académie Baroque Européenne d'Ambronay. He toured France, Spain, Romania and Poland with the 2007 edition of Le Carnaval et la Folie by André Cardinal Destouches directed by Hervé Nicquet. In spite of his ambition to apply himself even more to early music, he has always remained active as a guitarist. In this capacity he was asked to perform as a soloist for the Orchestra of the Monnaie in Brussels, in a production of Guiseppe Verdi's Falstaff directed by Kazushi Ono (2007), among others. He has been associated with the music academies of Wemmel and Vilvoorde as a guitar teacher since 2002.
