Over ten years have passed since the day when Andre Posman decided to open his own concert hall named The Red Pump (De Rode Pomp). It was not only a challenging effort for a history of art professor from Gent, but an awfully great risk too. Andre invested all his boiling energy and all his money, and built the hall with his own hands in the very center of beautiful Gent, in place of an old gasoline pump (this is how the logo symbol is explained; a red pump, that is, a heart pumping blood.)

The chosen core of activity was promoting works of today’ s Flemish composers: their performance in concerts and recording on CDs, setting up a library fund and issuing catalogues, and publishing a musical magazine dedicated to the music of living authors. In ten years of tireless work from early in the morning till late at night, Andre Posman has organised thousands of concerts and numerous festivals, seminars, lectures, and exhibitions. He has released 18 compact disks with records of his contemporaries’ music, and dozens of issues of the magazine New Flemish Music Review. All these years, he has been generous in sharing the results of his exhausting labor with musicians and audiences surrounding him.

St. Petersburg became the first city outside Belgium to receive the bubbling powerful active energy of the Flemish Chamber Music Alliance (official name of Andre Posman’s child). In 1999, supported by the promotional effort of St.  Petersburg's Northern Flowers Music Alliance, we received here the first-ever “Days of Flemish Music in St.  Petersburg”. The festival has become annual, and the interest in Flemish music shown by the Petersburg audience confirms that many years of efforts by Professor Posman were not lost.