In the words of his own website, cellist Roel Dieltiens "is not a 'star.' He is a discrete artist, open to discovery by his audience, a seeker who combines utmost thoroughness with great integrity and a passion for music." Noted for a breadth of interests that spreads from early music to mainstream repertory to contemporary compositions to ethnic music, Dieltiens has been responsible for choice performances and recordings in northwestern Europe and beyond.

Dieltiens was born in 1956 in Antwerp, Belgium. His father, Lode Dieltiens, was a choral composer, educator, and organist in Antwerp. Dieltiens studied the piano as a child, became disillusioned with it, and took up the cello at his brother's urging. With renewed musical energy, he studied at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Élisabeth in Waterloo and at Antwerp's Royal Flemish Conservatory, going on for lessons with Pierre Fournier in Switzerland and for postgraduate degrees at the Akademie für Solisten in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. Dieltiens has performed cello concertos under the leading lights of the Dutch historical performance movement: Frans Brüggen, Philippe Herreweghe, and Reinbert de Leeuw. He has also given the world premieres of contemporary works by Luc Van Hove and by composer William Bolcom.

Dieltiens' recording career began in 1995 with an album of concertos by Tartini, released on the Harmonia Mundi label. He has continued to record for that label as well as for MDG, Etcetera, and Alpha labels, among others, receiving the French Choc de Classica and Diapason d'Or awards along the way. In 2017, he was part of a chamber group that released the album Bach Privat on Alpha. Dieltiens performs on both Baroque and contemporary cellos, and he has worked with the traditional music group Muzikás as well as with his own chamber group, Ensemble Explorations. Dieltiens is on the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Zürich in Switzerland, and he has taught at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven, Belgium. In 2019, he released an album of the complete cello concertos of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, playing and conducting the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. In 2022, he joined fortepianist Andreas Staier for a recording of Beethoven's Op. 102 cello sonatas in period style. By that time, his recording catalog comprised some 30 items. ~ James Manheim, Rovi