When I was about 11 years old, I had the opportunity to do my school-internship with a production of the Dutch Radio Choir, where my mom works as a soprano. I got to see everything: the place where the choir books were prepared, got to sit in the front of the moving truck for the orchestra, got lifted onto the stage of the Concertgebouw with the grand-piano via the stage lift. Even got a tour of the Concertgebouw!

What an enormous task it is to prepare such a production and how incredibly special that, next to all of that work, everyone showed an 11-year-old everything with so much love, as if I were part of it all.

I sat in my chair during reheasals, and the choir sang Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. I was deeply impressed. How can so many people sound as if they are one? An organism with 80 heads that can whisper and roar, and breathe as one.

It’s truly unbelievable that I now have the privilege of sitting in the midst of all those beautiful sounds with my chair and being part of it as a freelancer with the fantastic Dutch Radio Choir.

I’m eagerly looking forward to performing Rachmaninoff’s The Bells and Tsoupaki’s Aurora with the choir on September 15th and 17th at TivoliVredenburg and the Concertgebouw. If you had told me when I was 11 that I would ever write something like this…