Thomas Beckmann comes from a family of music lovers in Düsseldorf. His great grandfather played trumpet in the military band and was awarded a silver trumpet for his beautiful playing by Germany’s last emperor. Beckmann’s elder brother lives in Munich and is a respected jazz musician. As related to Thomas, he became one of the most famous cellist world wide. Performance While cultivated cello evenings increasingly exclude the general public, to the regret of many a dyed-in-the-wool classical music fan, Thomas Beckmann manages with his imaginative concert programs to enthuse large culturally-oriented audiences of all age groups in full auditoriums. One remarkable event has took place in former USSR’s Moscow Palace. This is wait the daily news of the time wrote about the concert: “The German-Japanese duo Thomas Beckmann/Kayoko Matsushita roused the frenetically applauding audience in the hopelessly flooded concert hall to such a degree of enthusiasm that under the massive octave sequences of Chopin’s ‘Introduction and Polonaise’ the Steinway concert grand began to collapse and, on this memorable evening, in front of running TV-cameras, broke its right leg. The Japanese virtuoso finished the last piece of the evening on a tilted grand piano. After the final encore, ‘Elegie’, the Cultural Palace was a veritable witches’ cauldron; the audience jumped onto its seats and tore the programs to confetti.”