German contemporary classical pianist Dirk Maassen said he fell in love with music as a boy, when he first heard a pipe organ played in a local church. ∙ The video for Maassen’s 2014 composition “To the Sky” has garnered more than 400,000 views. ∙ In 2017, he was featured on Parisian rapper Kien’s single “Pensée d’un soir,” which introduced him to pop music audiences. ∙ He performed his first livestream concert in 2016, nearly four years before it became a widely used performance format during the 2020 pandemic. ∙ His 2020 outdoor concert for 30 socially distanced audience members was streamed live to 30,000 fans and later released as An Evening at Wilhelmsburg - EP.