Pieter Theuns
Pieter Theuns started his career as a self-taught guitar player with a focus on rock and pop music. Along the way, his attention shifted towards classical music. He earned a master’s degree in classical music from the Lemmensinstituut (under Raphaëlla Smits) and a bachelor’s degree in the theorbo at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels (under Philippe Malfeyt). After graduating, he was selected for the Académie Baroque Européenne d'Ambronay, under Hervé Nicquet.
In May 2009 he curated the festival Kunst in de Luwte, which saw the unique convergence of lute music and pop music. From 2009 to 2010 he played the lute for ‘Ashes’, a performance by contemporary dance troupe Les Ballets C de la B, which toured Europe. These genre-bending encounters set the tone for the rest of his career.
In the summer of 2010 he founded B.O.X. (Baroque Orchestration X), a musicians collective that uses baroque instruments and collaborates with artists in the indie rock scene, with a strong focus on creation. For their debut project ‘BOX=White Chalk/Amnesiac’ he created a composition based on the albums White Chalk by PJ Harvey and Amnesiac by Radiohead. In 2011, B.O.X. and Dez Mona produced the ballad opera Sága. This production was extremely successful in Belgium and was part of the Prototype Festival in Brooklyn, New York in January 2016. In 2013, B.O.X. produced the baroque pop opera You Us We All, which featured American singer and multi-instrumentalist Shara Worden, known for the project My Brightest Diamond. Following a successful European tour that included the Hamburg Summer Festival and the Holland Festival, the opera was part of the 2015 Next Wave Festival organised by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York, USA). B.O.X. also created The Loom of Mind, a collaboration with Icelandic artists Mugison and Pétur Ben, which was met with rave reviews.
During this time, Pieter Theuns remained active on the classical music scene as well, performing at numerous international festivals since 2020 with his ensemble Bel Ayre, including the Operadagen Rotterdam, the Monteverdi-Vivaldi Festival and the Venetian Centre for Baroque Music. In 2015 he was named artist-in-residence of the Festival of Flanders Mechelen in recognition of his talent for building bridges between different worlds. In the programme book, the organisation referred to him as an ‘ambassador of good taste’. As a freelance continuo, Theuns played with numerous orchestras, including Capella Mediterranea (Leonardo Garcia Alarcon), Ensemble Mare Nostrum (Andrea de Carlo) and Ensemble In Alto (Lambert Colson, Alice Foccroule).
