Tom Beghin - Mozart: Sonatas KV 331 'Alla Turca' & KV 570 | Fantasia KV 397 | Adagio KV 540 (2006)

Historical keyboardist Tom Beghin is also a musicologist with several important books to his credit. He specializes in performance issues and aesthetics in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and he has a collection of keyboard instruments that he plays in performance and on recordings. Beghin has issued several recordings of music played on historically appropriate instruments, including a box set covering Haydn's complete solo keyboard music. In 2024, he released a clavichord recording, Keyboard Keyworks: C.P.E. Bach - Sonatas with Varied Reprises, Wq 50.

Beghin was born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1967. He attended the Lemmens Institute in his hometown, studying with Alan Weiss and earning a Diplôme supérieur. He went on to the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel in Switzerland, where his primary teachers were Rudolf Buchbinder and Jean Goverts. Beghin then earned a doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, after studies with the musicologist James Webster and the fortepianist Malcolm Bilson. He made his recording debut in 1998 on the Eufoda label, backing soprano Andrea Folan on an album of Mendelssohn songs. His solo debut came two years later on the same label, featuring piano works by Ignaz Moscheles.

Beghin has successfully combined performing, writing, teaching, and recording in his career. He has appeared with such historical performance ensembles as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Apollo-Ensemble, Arion, and the Beethoven Academie, and is a common sight at early music festivals, including those in Bruges, Utrecht, Paris, Florence, and Montreal. He is co-editor of the book Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, which won the 2009 American Musicological Society Ruth A. Solie Award, and his book The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist appeared in conjunction with his complete recording of Haydn's solo keyboard music, issued on the Naxos label between 2009 and 2011. After recording for Eufoda, Naxos, and EtCetera, Beghin moved to the EPR-Classic label, where he has issued, among other recordings, Beethoven and His French Piano (2020) and Keyboard Keyworks: C.P.E. Bach - Sonatas with Varied Reprises, Wq 50. He is associate professor of music at McGill University in Montreal and has taught at the University of California - Los Angeles; he is also Senior Researcher at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. ~ James Manheim