Ian Arthur Plansker (b. 2003) is a versatile keyboardist, composer, and conductor currently based in Amsterdam. By day, he is a master’s student at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and by night, he plays piano for the various ballet schools around the city and conducts his own ensemble—Orchestra Lagrandt.

Plansker is originally from Detroit, Michigan where he grew up in a musical household—his father is a jazz pianist and his mother a ballet teacher. Plansker’s first instrument was the flute, which he studied with Sharon Sparrow of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Later on, he became interested in the harpsichord and historical performance under the guidance of Glenn Burdette. While in high school, he also traveled to the Oberlin Conservatory where he studied informally with Mark Edwards, Michael Lynn & David Breitman. It was then that he started to take composition seriously and in 2019, he composed an opera "The Spectres" which premiered at Oberlin’s annual Baroque Performance Institute.

At 16, he moved to Montréal, Canada and enrolled at McGill University where he undertook studies in harpsichord under the tutelage of Hank Knox and piano with Ilya Poletaev. While in Montréal, he founded the early music group Ensemble Bonaventure which went on to perform 3 years worth of successful concerts. Their inaugural performance was a fully staged production of Purcell's Dido & Æneas, which received an encouraging critique in Revue L'Opéra and led to an invitation to perform Rousseau's Le Devin du Village at the 2023 edition of the Festival Montréal Baroque.

While in his last year of studies at McGill, Plansker became increasingly interested in orchestral conducting at the encouragement of his mentors Elizaveta Miller and Dorian Bandy. He began to organize larger concerts with larger orchestras and choirs, championing Beethoven's Symphonies 5 & 7, Bizet's Jeux d'Enfants, excerpts from Mozart's Idomeneo & the North American Premiere of Thomas Linley Jr's Music for the Tempest with soprano Sophie Naubert. In 2024, he served as an assistant conductor for an Opéra McGill production of Massenet's Cendrillon under Stephen Hargreaves.

In August 2024, Plansker moved to the Netherlands to pursue a master’s degree in pianoforte performance with Olga Pashchenko at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Inspired by the passion for Romantic performance practice there, he joined forces with his friends and colleagues to found Orchestra Lagrandt, a period performance orchestra with a specialization in 19th and early 20th-century repertoire. They gave their first concert in March 2025 with the "Great" C major Symphony of Franz Schubert alongside a string serenade composed and conducted by Plansker. For the ‘25-’26 season they already have exciting plans for Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, and a new Romantic period-inspired arrangement of Bach’s St John Passion.

As a composer, Plansker considers himself a proponent of fin de siècle tastes. He has composed in an extensive range of genres and premiered his works across North America and Europe, including with frequent collaborators Saina Alikhani (soprano), Alice Boissinot Guastavino (soprano), Erik Schroeder (violinist/composer), and Kat Mulligan (poet). In the future, he is ambitious to compose opera that draws from the sounds and sights of the past.