Marien van Nieukerken studied with Thom Bollen. After obtaining a diploma in solo piano playing, he specialised as a song accompanist. He studied with George van Renesse, Karel Hilsum, Felix de Nobel and others. Rudolf Jansen. He is in great demand as a pianist for song recitals as well as musical theatre productions, chamber ensembles and oratorio concerts.
He works(ed) with numerous well-known singers, including Ruud van der Meer, Johannette Zomer, Andreas Schmidt and the legendary Guus Hoekman and accompanied song recitals at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Carnegie Hall in New York and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, among others. He has accompanied master classes by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Cora Canne Meijer and David Wilson-Johnson, among others.
Marien van Nieukerken collaborated on a large number of radio and television recordings. Together with baritone Charles van Tassel, he recorded a CD of songs by Charles Ives. For Donemus, they recorded songs by Matthijs Vermeulen.
He has a keen interest in composers whose repertoire is generally less known. Thus, with the soprano Claudia Patacca several recitals with songs by the almost forgotten Dutch composer Cornélie van Oosterzee. With German mezzo-soprano Almuth Herbst, he performed songs by Paul Kletzki, famous as a conductor but not so well known as a composer, during a tour in the US in 2002. He Zo worked regularly at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and in recent years has been a guest at the Hochschule für Musik in Weimar, the State University Montclair (USA), the Academia dell Arte in Osimo (Italy), the Faculty of Music at the University in Jyväskylä (Finland) and the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. In 2009, he did a concert tour of Japan together with soprano Mami Kawaguchi. A series of concerts and master classes for song duos in Japan is also planned for 2012.
Marien van Nieukerken works as a rehearsal pianist for singers at the ArtEZ Conservatoire. At the ArtEZ Conservatory, besides being leader of the Liedklas, he also teaches piano for chamber music and song accompaniment. For a long time, he also worked at the conservatories of Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. Marien van Nieukerken is artistic leader of the International Student Song Duo Competition he founded, which had its first edition in April 2009.
