Draft:Marie François

Marie François(Hechtel-Eksel) is a Belgian classical concert pianist.

Biografie
Marie François started to play the piano at the age of four. She finished her Bachelor degree with Joop Celis at the Conservatory of Maastricht, her masters degree in Belgium with Alan Weiss and her postgraduate at the Conservatory of Antwerp with Polina Leschenko. She perfected her playing at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole in Italy with Elisso Virsaladze.

François took part in masterclasses from Elisabeth Leonskaja, Jan Wijn, Pavel Gililov, Alexander Melnikov, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Anton Nell, Alexander Moutouzkine, Peter Donohoe… She took part in the Accademia Chigiana in Siena for four years where she had lessons with Lilya Zilberstein.

She performed in Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Greece, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Luxemburg, Italy, Ukraine, Romania, the UK and USA. Among those performances a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Romanian Athenaeum, The Queen Elizabeth Hall in Antwerp, at The Bijloke with Dirk Brossé and at Piano Days 2024 of Flagey, Brussels. She performed at the Martha Argerich Festival in Hamburg, the Piano Festival in Miami, the Schiermonnikoog Festival in The Netherlands and Aurora Music Festival in Sweden.

Her debut cd, Eclectic/Being me, was released in 2019 with the Dutch label, Challenge Records International. Two weeks later the cd got chosen among the 10 best classical music albums released that month on Apple Music worldwide. Together with artists such as Boris Giltburg and Renaud Capuçon. She released a new EP in 2021, Memories of Tomorrow.

She was a member of De Zes/Les Six, the young pianist's jury for Canvas and Klara during the 2016 piano edition of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. She often writes opinion pieces for multiple publications, is invited to join television panels and had her own tv programme on Eclips TV. During the COVID health crisis, she organized The Corona Cure, a concert tour and online talk show where she discussed the future of classical music with a multitude of guests from the music scene.

She also started her own podcast: Musings with Marie and is regularly asked to talk about classical music on the television and the radio.

"Who doesn't love Chopin's Nocturnes?" was a project inspired by François' years of admiration for the Polish composer's repertoire. In 2023 she spent one month in Warsaw, studying all the nocturnes of Chopin. She reported her process in a daily podcast series for which she received the Belgian Podcast Award for Best Independent Story.

François performs with artists such as violinist Geza Hosszu Legocky, pianist Tony Yike Yang & Soprano Kelly Poukens, with whom she recently won the Vrienden van het Lied prize in The Netherlands.

François is the first Yamaha Artist in the Benelux since 2024.

Discography
2019 - Eclectic/Being me : Clementi, Chopin, Prokofiev, Ginastera & Kapustin

2021 - Memories of Tomorrow : Chopin & Tchaikovsky