Otto Derolez

Otto Derolez is concertmaster of the Brussels Philharmonic, and generally considered to be one of the most important violinists of Belgium. After brilliant studies at the Royal Conservatories of Ghent and Brussels, with Professors such as Rudolf Werthen and Philippe Hirschhorn, he graduated at the Internationale Musikakademie für Solisten (IMAS) in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, under the guidance of Professor André Gertler. He also received important support and guidance from Professor Yfrah Neaman. He made his debut with the Brussels Philharmonic in 1999, with Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. With this orchestra he has performed the world premières of violin concertos by Jeroen d'Hoe, Boudewijn Buckinckx and Michel Tabachnik, all of them dedicated to Otto Derolez.

Otto Derolez is also a very active chamber musician. Since 1992 he has been a member of the Prometheus Ensemble, with whom he recorded Schubert's Octet and Trout Quintet, Stravinsky's l'Histoire du Soldat, Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony and Transfigured Night. He has been a jury member of the International Verbier Festival Orchestra, as well as the International Violin Competition Henri Vieuxtemps.

He performed as a soloist in the most prestigious concerthalls, such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Birmingham Symphony Hall, the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, the Festival Hall in Osaka, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, just to name a few. In 2005, invited by deFilharmonie (Antwerp Symphony Orchestra), he was highly acclaimed for his performance of the John Adams Violin Concerto. Shortly after that, another major success followed with the Alban Berg Violin Concerto and Brussels Philharmonic under the baton of Carlos Kalmar.

Besides his teaching at the LUCA School of Arts-Lemmensinstituut, from 2000 till 2011, Derolez has been invited on numerous occasions as Faculty Coach of symphony orchestras of Royal Music Conservatories in Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2012, Otto was invited by Leon Spierer (former Concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic) to become a Faculty Professor at OA-Orchestra of the Americas. This led to successful OA-projects in Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Estonia and Mexico.
Otto Derolez, highly appraised for his musical leadership, is Artistic Director of the Huilo Huilo International Music Festival in Patagonia, Chile. This yearly Festival, a project he started in 2017, has the goal of bringing intense, artistic training to the rising talents of South America. Invited by ESTA, the European String Teachers Association, Otto Derolez gave a major presentation at the ESTA International Conference at Oxford University in August 2013.

Otto Derolez, an acclaimed concertmaster and soloist, has performed and recorded filmscores from and with great composers such as Gabriel Yared, Stephen Warbeck, Angelo Badalamenti, Howard Shore, Carl Davis, Michel Legrand, Andres Goldstein, Daniel Tarrab, Dirk Brossé, Youki Yamamoto and many others.