Bram van Sambeek
is an international bassoonist and professor of bassoon at the Cologne University of Music. He is the only bassoonist to have received the most prestigious Dutch award in the field of classical music, the Dutch Music Prize. He is an alumnus of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and of The Bowers Program of the Chamber Music Society of New York’s Lincoln Center. He played for ten years as principal bassoonist in the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and as a regular guest principal in the London Symphony Orchestra and Mahler Chamber Orchestra. As a soloist, he performs with orchestras such as the Gothenburg, Lahti and Netherlands Symphony Orchestras. A dedicated chamber musician, he made his recital début at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 2003 and is a regular guest at prestigious festivals. Bram van Sambeek is known for his extremely versatile approach to bassoon playing, and is invited by some of Europe’s foremost concert halls to programme adventurous concerts, for example combining bassoon concertos by Vivaldi with hard rock songs, or playing the audience to sleep and letting them spend the night in the concert hall. Previous releases on BIS include a disc with bassoon concertos by Kalevi Aho and Sebastian Fagerlund which won the prestigious BBC Music Magazine Award, and an album of rock covers with ORBI (The Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments) which reached number 1 in the iTunes Classic Charts.