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BIOGRAPHY



Mattias Spee is a young multi-talented musician from The Netherlands. Over the years, he has garnered praise as a classical pianist because of his highly personal interpretations and his “velvet touch” on the keys. Especially in regards to contemporary repertoire, Spee has discerned himself as an adventurous musician for whom no challenge ever seems big enough. More recently, he has developed himself as a composer, improviser and interdisciplinary artist as well. Spee is celebrated for his versitality as a musician and he has regularly been called “one of the biggest piano talents of The Netherlands”. Spee’s practising instrument is a 1992 Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano, made available to him by the Dutch National Musical Instrument Foundation.


Education
Mattias Spee grew up in Hilversum. When his sister started taking piano lessons, Spee was initially deemed too young to be taken as a student himself. However, when he started playing the piano anyway and copying his sister’s exercises, he started having his very own music lessons. It was the start of a journey that continues to this day. One of Spee’s first teachers, Maaike Eijkman, introduced him to Ton Hartsuiker, one of the most prolific Dutch pianists of the 20th century. Hartsuiker and Eijkman massively helped Spee cultivate his interest in contemporary music. After studying at Young Talent Music Almere (2008-2012) and the Young Talent Department of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (2012-2015), Spee studied classical piano with David Kuyken and contemporary music with Ralph van Raat at the Conservatory of Amsterdam (2015-2021), where he graduated with a 9,5. After finishing his official education he started focusing on composition and improvisation, being coached by such accomplished musicians as Willem Jeths, Rembrandt Frerichs and Harmen Fraanje. Throughout the years Spee had masterclasses with several legendary pianists, including Michail Voskresensky, Pascal Rogé, Jacques Rouvier and Håkon Austbø.



Prizes
In the course of his career, Spee was a prize winner at such competitions as the SJMN Competition, the Rotterdam Piano Festival and Op de Stip, where he performed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in F major, KV 459 with Holland Symfonia in the finals at the Philharmonie Haarlem in 2011; Spee’s debut as a soloist. In 2014, he won the 1st prize at the Steinway Piano Competition at the Concertgebouw, resulting in an invitation to perform at the 16th International Steinway Festival in Hamburg. After winning the 1st prize in the regional finals and the 2nd prize in the national finals at the Princess Christina Competition, Spee was invited for concert tour to Taiwan in 2015, in trio formation with fellow prize winners Gerbrich Meijer on clarinet and Liesbeth Bosboom on cello. In 2019, Spee was the winner of the Vrienden Culture Prize, where jury chairwoman Daria van den Bercken lauded him for the vulnerability displayed in the performance of Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Preludes and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor, opus 90 during the finals. Spee was one of the finalists for the Dutch Classical Talent Award 2024, which meant he toured all major concert venues in The Netherlands with a program consisting of several Nocturnes and a 9-part cycle of original compositions entitled Insomnia. The jury of the Dutch Classical Talent Award describes Spee as follows: “A wilful and versatile musician, who also improvises and composes. In his playing, his air and his choice of repertoire, you can see his activist and rebellious nature. He doesn’t let anyone tell him what to do and totally sets his own course.”


Compositions
When composing, Spee draws much inspiration from stories. As a child, he loved fairy tales and mythology -not just to read, but also to make up himself- and you can hear this in his music. Spee primarily writes for solo piano, but more and more often leaves his comfort zone in order to write for bigger formations. Examples of this are his compositions Parachute for piano and cello, written for the occasion of a concert in the Janskerk celebrating the 900th anniversary of the city of Utrecht in 2022, and Insomnia for piano and string ensemble, which was premiered in collaboration with the Nova Sonantia Ensemble in 2023. As classical music was Spee’s first love, this is one of the foremost influences on his own pieces, but he has always had a passion for other genres and styles as well, like jazz, minimal and free improvisation, which he now combines into compositions that cannot really be put into a box. Many of Spee’s compositions originate from improvisation and he often leaves space in his pieces for spur-of-the-moment ideas.


Contemporary Music
 Besides his own compositions, Mattias premiered music by several other composers, including rediscovered pieces by 20th century composers Gerard van Brucken Fock and Hans Henkemans as well as new music. Examples of this include Gijs Idema’s Mirage in Blue, Lisa Weyrauther’s Nocturnal, a piece for prepared piano, and Samuel Carl Adam’s Piano Sonata no. 3, which Spee performed at the Concertgebouw in 2022 in a program which also included Adam’s Piano Sonatas nos. 1 and 2 and a new composition entitled Violin Dyptich for violin, piano and electronics, with Natalie Kulina playing the violin part and Spee taking charge of the piano part and the electronics. Spee has also worked with other composer/performers on premieres of their compositions. Examples of this include Linda Diaz’s Time’s Lament, Pepijn Streng’s Jij and Joshua Herwig’s What do You Know? In 2022, Spee collaborated with Titus Tielens on an album with new piano compositions by Tielens called Shades of Life. In 2023, Spee premiered a new piano concerto by Jo Sporck entitled Into Silence at November Music in collaboration with Phil Zuid. NRC crowned this “the high point of festival November Music” in their 5-star review.


Musical Treasure Hunt
Mattias is also fascinated by the incredible amount of music that has, justifiably or not, slipped into oblivion.Talented composers sometimes slip through the cracks for myriad reasons, which often have nothing to do with their music. Examples of forgotten children of music history whose music Spee has performed, are Louis Couperin, outshone by his nephew François, Mélanie Bonis, unable to have a musical career as a woman, or Alexei Stanchinski, who tragically died before breaking through. Spee thinks it’s important to pay attention to music that hides underneath a layer of dust and bring it to life again. This fascination of his has resulted in a series of albums entitled Eclipse, featuring music by unknown composers from history. The first album in this series, featuring piano music by Joseph Wölfl, was released in June of 2021. The second album, with music by the Dutch composer Hans Henkemans, including several unpublished manuscripts and a piano concerto that was never before recorded, came out in May of 2023. The third album is expected to be released in the 2024/2025 season.


Collaborations
Playing with others is important to Spee, because to him there is nothing more joyful than making music together. Besides performing in many project-based ensembles, he has been part of the Goudsbloem Trio for several years, together with cellist Hadewych van Gent and clarinetist Ana Prazeres. Together, they explored the well known repertoire for this combination of instruments, but also discovered exctiting, hardly ever performed music. Furthermore, Spee performed with a lot of musicians from many different backgrounds like Ed Spanjaard, Eva van der Sterren and Arturo den Hartog.


Interdisciplinary projects
Another one of Spee’s big passions is working with artists from other art disciplines. He was commisioned by the Grachtenfestival to make a story-telling concert called Where there is singing with novelist Shula Tas and cellist/vocalist Chieko Donker Duyvis, based on the book of the same name, in which Shula tells the story of how and why she stopped singing. Spee was also in charge of the music for the radio play Dancing with Death, a collaboration with writer/director Tabula Raas and voice actor Celine Vermeulen, that deals with the temptation of being released from suffering. Recently, Spee was a part of the project Tijdcapsules, with trombonist Arjan Linker, guitarist Gijs Idema, double bassist Benjamin de Boer and live electronics specialist Dimitri Geelhoed. For this show about the the relentless passing of time, this group of like-minded composers combined elements from Indian raag, Georgian folk music, Renaissance polyphony and pop bands like Radiohead by means of improvisation into a dreamscape, supported with light effects by visual artist Lisa Derksen Castillo.