Concert performer, teacher, composer, arranger, organizer, artistic and musical director … Whoever would like to embrace the prodigious diversity of the activities of the mandolinist Vincent Beer-Demander exposes himself to the risk of an inevitable vertigo.

Moreover, the ferocious eclecticism of his artistic collaborations explodes, by demultiplying it, the image of an instrument long frozen in an outdated popular folklore. In his hands, the little lute is caught in a game of mirrors, revealing unexpected facets, a scintillating diffraction of possibilities: from Vladimir Cosma to Régis Campo, from André Minvielle to Richard Galliano, the galaxy explored is in permanent expansion, Vincent Beer-Demander refusing to impose a limit to his insatiable and continuously renewed curiosity.

One finds in this joyful and perfectly assumed bulimia the intact trace of childhood emotions, the echo of revelations that decide one’s 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 make the ideals of popular education live.

The first shock – a concussion, even – in front of the power and the sincerity of Freddy Mercury, the singer of Queen with a meteoric and tragic career.

Music will be a way to be in the world, to stand in it, to say its word. Consequently, everything yields to him, and in particular the practice of sport, until then intensive, of which he keeps the taste of the effort and the fighting spirit. With a Homeric energy, Vincent Beer-Demander devours the whole repertoire and sharpens his technique with Florentino Calvo. The master opens the doors of his class at the National School of Argenteuil, the Mecca of mandolin in France, while at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, Alberto Ponce accompanies him to the prestigious concert license that had never been awarded to a mandolinist.

Those who knew the young musician felt 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, the stature of the concert performer imposed itself with the tours that followed, punctuated by commissions and creations, and collaborations in all directions. In a career spanning twenty years, one can no longer count the number of decisive events that Vincent Beer-Demander has led, in France as well as abroad, to give a future to his instrument. Installed in Marseille, he created, like his old mentor from Toulouse, a popular academy in the districts as well as a class at the Conservatoire de Marseille and at the Conservatoire Royal der Liège for the higher education, attentive to the fact that the repertoire he created is transmitted and that the practice of the mandolin, deeply renewed, is anchored in the musical life.