Vincent Beer-Demander is one of the most active and committed mandolinists of his generation. Soloist, composer and teacher, he defends the mandolin on the greatest international stages. Trained at the Conservatories of Marseille, Paris and Naples, he collaborates with artists such as Michel Legrand, Vladimir Cosma and Richard Galliano, and performs with prestigious orchestras. A prolific composer, he enriches the contemporary mandolin repertoire and teaches at the Marseille Conservatoire. Passionate about his instrument, he strives to make it shine through a repertoire that blends learned, popular and film music.
An international concert performer, he is the dedicatee of numerous mandolin concertos, including those by Vladimir Cosma, Lalo Schifrin, Claude Bolling, Francis Lai, Jean Claude Petit, Richard Galliano Léo Brouwer, Hamilton de Holanda, Mike Marshall, Ricardo Sandoval, Régis Campo, François Rossé, Félix Ibarrondo… A composer published by Editions d’Oz, Mundoplectro, Hody and Trekel, Vincent Beer-Demander has written music for Akhenaton, Dooz Kawa, Féloche, Lucariello, L’Orchestre de Saint Pétersbourg, Serge Valleti, Arianne Ascarides. .. and teaches mandolin at the Conservatoire National à Rayonnement Régional de Marseille in France and at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège in Belgium.
Concertist, teacher, composer, arranger, organizer, artistic and musical director… Anyone wishing to embrace the prodigious diversity of mandolinist Vincent Beer-Demander ‘s activities runs the risk of inevitable vertigo.
Moreover, the ferocious eclecticism of his artistic collaborations explodes and multiplies the image of an instrument long frozen in outdated folklore. From Vladimir Cosma to Régis Campo, from André Minvielle to Richard Galliano, the galaxy explored is constantly expanding, with Vincent Beer-Demander refusing to impose any limits on his insatiable and constantly renewed curiosity.
In this joyful, perfectly assumed bulimia, we find the intact trace of childhood emotions, the echo of revelations that decide a life: the meeting with Francis Morello, his first teacher who taught him the rudiments, in Toulouse, in the music school that, as a wise humanist, he created to bring to life the ideals of popular education. The first shock – a concussion, even – at the power and sincerity of Freddy Mercury, the Queen singer whose career was meteoric and tragic.
Music will be a way of being in the world, of standing up to it, of saying his piece. As a result, everything yields to him, not least his hitherto intensive practice of sport, from which he retains a taste for effort and a fighting spirit. With Homeric energy, Vincent Beer-Demander devours the entire repertoire and hones his technique with Florentino Calvo. The master opened the doors to his class at the École Nationale d’Argenteuil, France’s leading mandolin school, while at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, Alberto Ponce accompanied him to the prestigious concert license, which had never before been awarded to a mandolinist.
Those who came into contact with the young musician sensed the urgency of a vocation to which everything submitted. From then on, life accelerated and intensified: the first prizes piled up – seven in four years – the taste for the stage was confirmed, and the stature of the concert performer asserted itself with the tours that followed, punctuated by commissions and creations, and collaborations of all kinds. In a career spanning twenty years, Vincent Beer-Demander has supported countless decisive events, both in France and abroad, to give his instrument a future. Now based in Marseille, he has set up, like his old mentor from Toulouse, a popular academy in the suburbs, as well as a class at the Marseille Conservatoire and at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège for higher education, keen to ensure that the repertoire he has created is passed on and that the practice of mandolin, profoundly renewed, takes root in musical life.
