PROJECTS
These projects I co-founded with like-minded musicians and friends. What started out as ideas in the pub, germinated into some award-winning organisations.
In the heart of Amsterdam you'll find Splendor: a club for every kind of music, conceived and founded by 49 musicians and myself and our supporters. Splendor is a meeting place, a club, a workspace, a musical laboratory, and much, much more. We won the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts in 2015, when we were just 2 years old.
In late 2011, five colleague musicians from the Dutch Radio and I took it upon ourselves to defy prevailing trends and initiate a new musical collective. A collective that would distinguish itself through flexibility, not only with respect to its artistic content, but also from a practical point of view: the size of the collective can vary from soloists to a symphonic orchestra. A collective that would not only deliver quality performances driven by an intrinsic need to perform the finest music with the greatest musicians in the best way possible, but also add an enterprising mind and a broad social outlook. The group was born, and goes by the name of LUDWIG, after Beethoven, cultural entrepreneur avant la lettre. In January 2018 we were awarded a Grammy Award for our recording Crazy Girl Crazy with the Canadian soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan.
Up to 2014 nothing ever happened culturally on St. Patrick's Day in Amsterdam(Irish national holiday, March 17th), and so my Amsterdam-based Irish friend Deirdre Daly and I decided to change this and created a mini-festival focussing on Irish culture.It became such a success that in 2019 we had to call it a day as the funding couldn't match the organisational demands required to keep a festival of this high calibre running smoothly. Nevertheless, it was great fun organising 6 epic editions!
My most recent project is the Hoboplatform. The Netherlands has not had an Oboe Society for about two decades, and I think it's important that oboists in the Netherlands have an organisation to help promote this instrument.
Hardly no young Dutch players are entering the profession which will cause problems for amateur and professional groups in the future, due to a lack of oboe teachers and thus young players and is an issue that I think needs to be seriously addressed. Hopefully with this new burst of energy into the Dutch Oboe world we can make a difference.