Laura Sandee

Laura Sandee (1978) started playing the piano at the age of five. She won several prices at young national competitions. She studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (Holland) where she got her title: Master of Art in performing solo and chamber music in 2003. Her teachers were Rian de Waal and Håkon Austbø (from the Conservatory of Amsterdam) With Håkon she developed special skills for interpreting Olivier Messiaen’s music. She took master classes with Jan Wijn, Edith Grosz-Lateiner, Jörg Demus, Gabor Eckhardt and Vladimir Tropp.Laura is an active pianist and likes to play challenging pieces with different kinds of groups. Besides that, she gave solo recitals in major venues in the Netherlands such as Muziekcentrum Vredenburg and Frits Philips Muziekcentrum Eindhoven.Since 2007 she is the pianist of Insomnio ensemble for contemporary music and she also performed with the Nieuw Ensemble and played synthesizers with Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. Together with her friend Anna van Nieukerken she founds the Sandee/Van Nieukerken pianoduo in 2002. Next to the classics of Ravel,Messiaen,Ligeti the duo regularly commission new compositions. They gave recitals in Enschede, Eindhoven and during the ‘Suite Muziekweek’ in Muziekgebouw aan‘t IJ in Amsterdam and they like to perform concerts with theatrical aspects. In the spring of 2009 the duo was semi-finalist at the International Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition and finalist at the Almere Chamber Music Competition in spring 2009. Laura is a member of the Rondane Quartet, a quartet which specializes in performing the works for four grand pianos of Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt. As a soloist she performed piano concertos in and outside Holland with orchestras as the Collegium Musicum Schloss Pommersfelden (Germany 2001, 2003), Krasnoyarsk Academic Symphony Orchestra (Siberia 2004, 2005) and Insomnio (Finland, The Netherlands and Germany 2007, 2008, 2010). In 2004 a good friend and talented composer Reza Namavar wrote a piano concerto especially for her. She accompanies and performs with the Residency Choir. From 2000 until 2006 she taught in a special project for young children at the Royal Conservatory The Hague. After that she continued teaching minor students as well.