It’s also a marathon session for the media, with live broadcasts from the Royal Conservatory of the semi-finals (which started this week) on digital channel Canvas+ and a live transmission of the final evening for everyone on the regular Canvas channel.

The face of the competition for Flemish viewers is VRT television’s Thomas Vanderveken, also a presenter on Klara radio. He’s only 27, which means he’s the same age as some of the contestants. Unlike them, he’s done this all before. If his half-time interviews with the musicians seem a little rushed, it’s probably him who needs to be somewhere else.

At the moment, he can be seen presenting Mercator, a 13-week series in which contestants sail a three-master to an unknown destination. The series found Vanderveken flitting from port to port on planes while the contestants suffered on board – even though he found he was immune to seasickness and they, decidedly, weren’t. “The doctor said my balance organ must be broken,” he told a radio audience in February.

The “balance organ” is in the inner ear, but there’s clearly nothing wrong with Vanderveken’s ears. Born in 1981, the son of prolific TV actor Ugo Prinsen, Vanderveken was given a violin at the age of four and put in front of a piano at five. After school, he was ready for a year-long world trip, when he heard he had passed the entrance exam for the Brussels Conservatory. There he studied piano and earned a Master’s degree in music theory.

Thanks to his family’s contacts, in 2000 he turned up as an actor in the hospital drama Spoed, where he stayed for four years. In 2001, meanwhile, he was taken on as a presenter with youth channel JIMtv.

“Some people find it odd that I do so little these days with my master’s in music,” he says. “But I never studied music to be able to win the Queen Elisabeth Competition. I only wanted to learn to play piano well. But I don’t rule out the possibility that I might appear on the stage one day.”

Partly as a result of his dark good looks and partly because of his easy and natural style, he’s in big demand in the entertainment sector of the VRT, where he moved in 2003. As well as Mercator, he’s been a regular on Vlaanderen Vakantieland, a travel show and was co-host of Steracteur Sterartiest, in which celebrities turned into singers for charity.

It’s a long way from the intricacies of the Rach Three or the Hammerklavier, but Vanderveken doesn’t see the conflict. “If you ask me, the typical Klara listener doesn’t exist. Someone who loves classical music will still want to watch Vlaanderen Vakantieland in the evening, don’t you think?”

In his free time, he likes to go to concerts at Jazz Station on the Leuvensesteenweg in Brussels, near where he lives, and spend time with girlfriend Véronique Leysen, herself an actress. He teaches TV presentation at the Artesis college in Antwerp, part of the Herman Teirlinck Institute (the Flemish equivalent of London’s RADA) and boasts that it was he who sent home Freek Braeckman, this year’s eventual winner of TV quiz show De Slimste mens ter wereld just as he was about to break the record number of appearances.

“Up to now I’ve taken on assignments on the basis of two criteria. One: does it amuse me? and two: will I learn something? Other than that, I have no career plan. I do things one day at a time.”

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