Real Men Play The Harp aims to dispel the popular notion that the harp is a feminine instrument, capable only of soft and angelic melodies. Three international male soloists will perform harp concertos with orchestra, showcasing a very different side of the instrument! All the usual harp stereotypes will be cast aside one after another, either with a humorous touch or with jaw-dropping wonderment. After this experience, your conception of the harp will never be the same.

We believe this concert will bring a whole new audience to the harp, catch the interest of the media, and ultimately create many new opportunities for the instrument. However, none of it will be possible without you. By contributing even a small amount, you can help bring us closer to our goal. Your financial support will go directly toward paying the musicians of the orchestra and the soloists, renting the hall, and providing the pre-show presentation. We appreciate your support so much that we are offering special rewards to our donors, from free tickets to VIP arrangements, free harp lessons, or even a harp concert hosted in your own home! Please visit our project page to join in the effort. Thanks so much!

P.S. Trouble understanding the donation process? Please contact us at info@harpfestival.nl and we shall be happy to provide assistance!

Marit Eisses: I’ve been coordinating the competition, basically from the beginning. My job currently involves processing the applications, and I am also responsible for all the communication with the contestants. In the [board] meetings, I am the person who represents the competition. When there’s a conflict between the festival interests and the competition, I’m the one who defends the competition’s interests. I look at the whole event from the competitors’ point of view, whereas the business director, for instance, would take the financial approach to things and perhaps argue points by saying, “We would really have to look at our budget.” I would be the one to say, “No, we have to think of our contestants.”

All the board members are doing multiple things, actually. I’m the competition director, but I’m also the head of the secretariat, so I’m receiving all incoming communication, coordinating the meetings, doing all the translations and editing, and basically everything having to do with written texts.

EJ: As your regular day-job, I understood you work with costumes. So then, how did you get involved in organizing a harp festival?

ME: Yes, I’m a dress historian, actually. I work at the fashion and costume department of the Gemeentemuseum [Municipal Museum of The Hague]. I first met Remy back when I was younger, we come from the same town. We kind of lost touch, but two years ago we found each other again, and I offered to help him with the organization of the Dutch Harp Festival. For the first edition of the festival, I was involved as an assistant to the PR department, to the secretariat also, and I was the competition jury secretary. For this second edition, most of the people who were on the board last time had left, but apparently some of them had recommended me to take over one of the positions, so I was asked to join the board. True, I’m not very much involved with the harp, but I do very much enjoy it.

This festival is certainly a change from what I usually do. It’s a big contrast to be, on the one hand, competition director for the Dutch Harp Festival, and on the other hand, just a department assistant at the museum. Along with the other board members of the DHF, I’m on top of everything, I get to make the decisions, and I have a lot of influence over how things will happen.

EJ: As we’re having this conversation [Nov 15, 2011], the submission deadline for the tape round of the Harp Competition is just about to arrive. Can you explain how the judging for this round will take place?

ME: We’re collecting all the application documents right now. The first thing that will happen is we will review all the documents to see if everything is in order. The artistic committee will check whether the program is okay: whether it’s within the time limit and whether they agree with it artistically. When everything is in order and the quality of the audio recordings are checked, then there will be a jury sitting. We have invited three jury members to judge all the audio recordings. We’ll make the recordings anonymous, so the jury members will not know who is playing what. Once we have the results, we’ll have to wait until we have everyone’s confirmation and everyone has paid the registration fee and promises to come to Holland, then we can announce the names of the contestants and do everything to prepare for the live competition.

EJ: You said there are three jury members, but they are anonymous, right?

ME: Yes, we can’t announce their identities, because otherwise they could technically speaking make contact with the contestants, or the contestants could make contact with them and send them their audio recordings so they could perhaps recognize it when judging… Not that we do not trust our jury, but of course we don’t want that to be possible, we really want to guarantee the anonymity of the audio recordings. That’s why there are really strict procedures. I’m the only person who knows the identity of the candidates and which recordings they sent in, so I don’t get to be present at some of the jury sittings, for example when they decide where the cut-off point is established for how many contestants will go through. Nobody else can hear the audio recordings before the jury sitting as well; I’m the only one who has access to them. It’s a rigorous procedure. If you want to organize a competition with a high level of transparency and not allow for any corruption, you have to be quite strict. Otherwise, there are too many loopholes. I just want to be able to tell everyone it was really honest, and you can check that we didn’t do anything debatable or didn’t influence anything ourselves. The results came directly from the jury and weren’t anything that we could have affected.

EJ: Are there any other things about the
procedure of this competition that makes this one unique?

ME: The basic one is this issue of anonymity: the fact that two of the rounds take place behind a screen, or at least without the identities of the contestants being revealed. Therefore, initially, it’s entirely about the music and not about other things that may consciously or unconsciously influence a jury’s judgment, such as how someone looks, or whether they know this person, or what their nationality is. The first judgment is
really just the music.

Also, the jury is approached not as a collective team who together have to evaluate and judge the performance of the contestant, but the jury members are invited as individual musicians who individually must decide which candidates they prefer. There shouldn’t be any influence from the other jury members within the evaluation; they can’t discuss the candidates. And they don’t give any grades as part of the voting procedure. With a lot of other competitions, they have to give you a number on the scale of 1 to 10 how well you perform, and usually you have these very extreme grades which significantly affect the average grade, by which one jury member can sometimes exert a lot of influence over the outcome. In every round of the Dutch Harp Competition, the jury members just have to answer the question, “Do I want to hear this contestant again? Yes or no.” And for the final round they just have to make an order of ranks, “Who do you think should receive 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize?” They don’t get to add further subjectivity to it. But, of course, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. As is the case with these blind auditions, you can’t always tell the difference between young contestants and those who are older and who have therefore just had more experience and more time to learn. Behind the screen, you can’t see if someone is just very young and still has a lot of development to go through. You can’t give them credit for being a brilliant harpist at 14 years old but just not as good as someone who already has an established career.

EJ: But that’s often an issue in competitions, because people are impressed when the young ones can play well. It’s kind of a handicap to be older, in a way.

ME: Yes, it must be true that you’re often at a disadvantage to be older.

EJ: But behind a screen, you can use your experience to your advantage.

ME: There’s one other element by which we really try to create an honest judging procedure. We’re taking care how we establish who will be on the juries for the preliminary round and the competition in March, because we want to create a very balanced jury, in most ways. We want jury members from different nationalities and also an equal number of men and women (or at least not all men and one woman). We want to have older musicians as well as younger ones and also more non-harpists than harpists. This way, you get a lot of different influences combined. It’s sometimes said about competitions which take place in a specific country, that harpists from that country always win. I think part of that phenomenon is the national allegiances of the jury members and the competitors, but it’s also just the style of playing that people have learned to appreciate within their own country. We really want to let that go and make sure the Dutch style doesn’t necessarily get preference, that different tastes and different musical traditions are represented in the jury.

Marit and some of her favourite reform dresses, currently on display at the Gemeentemuseum. Photograph taken by Astrid Hulsmann.

Despite composing around 100 works, in almost every genre, Marius Flothuis had no formal training in  composition. He had studied piano from an early age, and inventing new music had always gone hand-in-hand with his explorations of the instrument. He premiered his first creations while still in grammar school. Otherwise, his music education and subsequent work centered mainly around musicology. He wrote extensively, authoring many articles, critical reviews, and several books. In his research, he displayed a special preference for Mozart. His doctoral thesis was on Mozart’s arrangements of his own works and of works by other composers, and his book “Mozart’s Piano Concertos” explores the classical composer’s evolution through his concertos. Flothuis arranged the Divertimenti for piano and completed cadenzas for all of Mozart’s piano concertos, for which they had not already been written. Many harpists may be familiar with his cadenzas for Mozart’s flute and harp concerto, arguably the most stylistically sensitive we have to choose from.

The positions Flothuis held over the years gave him a central place within the musical society of the Netherlands in the 20^th century. He was associated with the famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for many years, serving first as assistant to the artistic director, then as programme editor, and finally as artistic director himself. He also worked as a music critic, the librarian at Donemus Amsterdam, professor of musicology in Utrecht, and chairman of the Zentralinstitut für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg. It is amazing to think that he found time for composing, on top of all these responsibilities he assumed.

His prefered genre was chamber music, and he also featured the voice in many of his works. Strangely, of all the songs he composed – with either piano or orchestral accompaniment – the one genre he never pursued was opera. His œuvre also includes many lesser-known pieces for harp, or for various combinations of chamber ensemble with harp. For those who have discovered Flothuis through the Pour le tombeau d’Orphée, it may be particularly interesting to explore the rest of what he has written for the instrument.

• Kleine suite, for twelve harps (1951)
• Sonata da camera, for flute and harp, (1951), awarded the Northern California
  Harpists Association Prize.
• Berceuse brève, for harp, op. 75, no. 1
  (1963)
• Allegro vivace, for two harps, op. 75,
  no. 2 (1969)
• Molto lento, for harp, op. 75, no. 3
  (1975)
• Allegro, con precisione, for harp, op.
  75, no. 4 (1978)
• Allegro fugato, for three harps, op. 75,
  no. 5 (1984/1994)
• Six easy studies, for harp, op. 87
  (1985-6)
• Sonorités opposées, for harp, op. 75,
  no. 6 (1986)
• Rapsodie, for harp, op. 102 (1999)
• Saraband, for mezzo-soprano and harp, op. 103 (2001)
• Odysseus and Nausikaa, madrigal for voice quartet and harp, op. 60 (1958-60)
• Trois nocturnes, for cello and harp, op. 84 (1983-4)
• Poeme, for harp and small orchestra, op. 96 (1993)

The solo that will be performed by the contestants in the Dutch Harp Competition – Pour le tombeau d’Orphée – was written in 1950. Flothuis dedicated the piece to Phia Berghout, one of the most highly regarded harpists of his generation in Holland. She played with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and, later in life, was one of the founders of the World Harp Congress. Even just within the Tombeau we can see many characteristic elements of Flothuis’ style. Above all, he was concerned with the quest for purity and beauty. His most important musical influences were Mozart, Debussy, and Willem Pijper (a Dutch composer of the generation previous to Flothuis). Like the former two, Flothuis concentrated much of his attention on form and the relationship of form to content. In these aspects, his work is concise and displays clarity and balance. Borrowing from Pijper’s germ-cell technique, he had a style of constructing very short motives, each with a limited range and minimal repetition of notes, and then sending these motives through endless variation. This technique appears from the very beginning of the Tombeau. His melodies – those in the Tombeau being no exception – have a way of winding along chromatically by whole- and half-steps. He makes use of polyrhythms, polymeters, and irregular meters, which appear here as unexpected devices to create variation throughout the piece. And, while he was aware of the post-modernist drive to free music of tonality, and he did experiment with dodecaphonism in some of his works, his could not deny the need for his music to gravitate to one or more tonal center.

It is said that Marius Flothuis lead his life – both professional and personal – with great integrity. Even throughout the tumult that the second world war caused in Western Europe, he stuck to his ideals, upheld his sense of morality, and always sought truth. In as much as one’s soul is made transparent through music, Flothuis’ compositions reflect this admirable character. This is as great a legacy as anyone could hope to leave.

References:
- Joyce Kiliaan, ‘Marius Flothuis’, Amsterdam: 1999
- Stichting Donemus, ‘Catalogus van werken van Nederlandse componisten; 5: Marius Flothuis’, Amsterdam 1950

Saskia Rekké opened the afternoon with an introduction to the harp. After some brief comments on the history of the instrument, she explained the basic structure of the harp, for anyone who has never had a chance to meet one up close. Non-harpists often don’t realize that there are seven pedals, each with three possible positions, which make the strings sound sharp, natural or flat; and even if they know that the harpist must tune each of the 47 strings individually, they may not realize that tuning (and staying in tune) is a whole art in itself. Then, because composers often tend to approach composing for the harp as they would for the piano, Saskia highlighted a list of ways in which the harp is not a piano and discussed how to compose in a more idiomatic way, giving tips such as “no more than seven pitches in a scale”, “no more than two pedals at a time”, “no fast and virtuosic trills or scales on wire strings”, etc. She even covered the wide range of special effects and colors that are possible on the harp, providing notational examples, especially from the work of Carlos Salzedo, and assisted by Sabien Canton who demonstrated the effects at the harp.

Once the audience’s imagination had been captured by the possibilities to be explored at the harp, it was time to hear some real-life examples in a “Zapp Concert” featuring fragments of 20^th century harp repertoire, performed by Miriam Overlach and Sabien Canton. The program included “Pour le tombeau d’Orphee” by Marius Flothuis, “Sequenza, II” by Luciano Berio, and selections by Ravel, Aperghis and Saariaho.

The audience was then treated to some wisdom directly from one of these experienced composers for the harp. Roel van Oosten. He gave important insight into how he approached the creation of his harp concerto, taking a more “traditional” approach and mostly avoiding what he called the “playground of strange sound effects”, so often overused by composers impressed with the novelty of such effects.

The workshop finished by allowing the composers in the audience to split into smaller groups, thus having the chance to go further in depth by interacting directly with a harpist, asking questions and trying out their ideas on the instrument. In the end, the workshop helped stir up discussion and get people brainstorming. Hopefully, everyone came away from it motivated to run home and start scribbling notes down on the page. We’re looking forward to seeing what creations come out of it and what new voices emerge.

Joaquín Rodrigo is a well-known composer – not just within the harp world – and is particularly appreciated in the Netherlands. I’ve known about Rodrigo since I was a kid. I had a recording of his Concierto Serenata for harp that I sometimes would listen to as I was going to bed, and I remember there was one part in the first movement that I loved so much I would rewind the disc and listen to it over and over. As I became more serious about harp, I knew that there were three concertos for harp by Rodrigo – the two previously mentioned and also Sones en la Giralda. I could have told you he was Spanish too, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. For example, I didn’t know until just recently that he was blind from the age of 3! That year, there was an epidemic of Diphtheria in his home town, and he was one of the few children lucky enough to survive. It is amazing to think that he did all his composing without being able to see. In fact, he attributes his decision to pursue music to his blindness, since the condition made him more attuned to his inner world. As I explore, I appreciate more and more what an admirable man he was, and I learn how much more of his music there is to discover.

Joaquín Rodrigo lived to be nearly 100 years old; from 1901 to 1999, his lifetime spanned quite literally the entire 20^th century. A prolific composer, he produced 170 works of different instrumentations and genres. He played the piano, but he also composed extensively for the guitar, one of the most prominent instruments in the Spanish musical tradition. His music is said to capture the eternal essence of Spain, and he did this with unshakable authenticity. Despite the radical musical trends witnessed in the course of the 20^th century, which attempted to break from the past – serialism, electronic music, etc. – and despite the pressure by leading composers and musicologists to push far beyond the limits of what audiences actually wanted to hear, Rodrigo was more interested in serving as a continuation of his country’s tradition. His own voice remained unaffected by criticisms, in response to which he is quoted as having said, “My cup may be small, but I drink from my own cup.” Judging by the impressive list of honors bestowed on him, such as the title of “Marqués de los jardines de Aranjuez” and the Prince of Asturias Prize, this approach did not fail to earn respect. He is now regarded as one of the most significant composers of Spanish music in the 20^th century. Aside from the works we are familiar with as harpists, you may also want to discover some of his other gems: Soleriana Suite, 5 piezas infantiles and Sonata a la española.

His Concierto de Aranjuez was composed originally for guitar in 1939. It takes its name from the magnificent palace and gardens of Aranjuez – a small town fifty kilometers south of Madrid – once the spring resort of the Spanish royalty. The idea to write the concerto was conceived the summer before, over lunch with guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza, who also gave its premier performance in Madrid. Rodrigo was living in Paris at the time. Following in the footsteps of his compatriots, de Falla, Albéniz and Turina, he had made the pilgrimage to this thriving cultural heart of Europe in 1927, where he studied at the École Normale de Musique with Paul Dukas. It was also in Paris that he met his wife, Victoria Kamhi, a pianist from Turkey, who would give up her aspiration of a performance career to devote herself entirely to him. She became his eyes; she would read to him and describe their visual landscape to him in colorful detail. The couple encountered serious financial hardships while abroad, during the Spanish Civil War, when Rodrigo lost the scholarship that he had been depending on. During this time, and just as he was composing the Concierto de Aranjuez, Victoria became pregnant with their first child, but suffered a miscarriage. The sadness and anger at the loss of his child and a hint of fear at possibly losing his wife can be heard in the soulful and reflective second movement. It is this movement that has inspired numerous arrangements and creative interpretations by leaders of popular culture: jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and Gil Evans in the album “Sketches of Spain”, pianist Chick Corea in “Spain”, and more recently Jim Hall and Carlos Santana. The version for harp, however, was done by the composer himself, at the request of harpist Nicanor Zabaleta, in 1974. It could even be said that the Concierto de Aranjuez was meant to one day find its expression through the harp, because in the program notes of the concerto’s premier, Rodrigo wrote that he envisioned the piece for an “imaginary instrument which might be said to possess the wings of the harp, the heart of the grand piano and the soul of the guitar.”

In my research on Joaquín Rodrigo, I uncovered many beautifully-written and informative sources. Far from being a comprehensive study, this brief article is meant only to inspire your interest, providing just a hint of what information is out there. For further exploration into the life of Joaquin Rodrigo, the best place to start is the official website of the Ediciones Joaquín Rodrigo and the Victoria and Joaquín Rodrigo Foundation. A beautiful tribute to Joaquín Rodrigo, written by Pablo Zinger, appeared in the Arts section of the New York Times at the time of the composer’s death, in 1999: “A Composer Who Found Strength in an Inner Vision.” You may also want to check out the documentary “Shadows and Light; Joaquín Rodrigo at 90”, directed by Larry Weinstein and produced by Rhomus Media. There are also several significant books which may be of interest. His wife, Victoria Kamhi, wrote an autobiography entitled “Hand in Hand With Joaquín Rodrigo; My Life at the Maestro’s Side”. Guitarist Graham Wade is one of the leading authorities on Rodrigo and has published several books, including “Joaquín Rodrigo – A Life in Music: Traveling to Aranjuez (1901-1939)”. Both of these books and others can be found in the online shop of the Ediciones Joaquín Rodrigo.

From what I found, there are two major recordings of the Concierto de Aranjuez in its version for harp and orchestra:
“Rodrigo: Complete Orchestral Music, Vol. 9”, Naxos, 2002. Gwyneth Wentink and the Asturias Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maximiano Valdes.“Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez”, Naïve. Isabelle Moretti and the Royal Seville Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edmon Colomer.
There is also a very interesting version of the piece for harp and organ:
“Harp and Organ Recital”, K and K Verlagsanstalt, 2007. Olja Kaiser, harp, with Ulrike Northoff, organ.

In the tribute article cited above, Pablo Zinger wrote of the Concierto de Aranjuez: “The work’s formidable commercial success does not in any case detract from its beauty, fine craftsmanship, superb melodies and wise instrumentation, which made it a perfect vehicle for the guitar at a time when that instrument was not considered a worthy classical vehicle.” It could be said that the concerto’s transcription for harp, alongside Rodrigo’s other works for harp, does a similar service for our instrument. Since the underlying mission of the Dutch Harp Festival is to promote the harp as an instrument worthy of respect, granting Joaquín Rodrigo this place of honor on next year’s programme seemed a natural choice.

As is customary, there will likely be lots of tiny updates in the coming days, but in the end we’ll have a great website! And, even more important, you’ll have one good source where all the festival’s information, whether you’re a visitor, competitor or composer – or just interested in what’s going on

Gert has joined the board this year, stepping up from his role as advisor for the previous edition of the festival. As business director of the Dutch Harp Festival, he handles all the financial and legal aspects of the organization as well as working closely with artistic director Remy van Kesteren to expand the festival’s professional network. When he is not planning a harp festival, Gert is the managing director of the ICT companies RedAnt business solutions and Prometech security software.

EJ: Gert, tell us about what you do for the Dutch Harp Festival (DHF). How did you get to be involved?

GW: It was such an amazing week last time. When Remy got in touch with me after last summer and he asked me to join the board of directors, I didn’t have to think twice to be involved in this project again. Last time, the festival was being run by lots of very artistic people… So now, my role has been to help with the business side of things. In the first edition, I was involved as an advisor.

EJ: What did you advise on?

GW: Lots of things! I started off working on promotion, mainly on the website and graphic design, but my job evolved to include giving suggestions on how to run the business side of things. Now, I work on the contracts and on the financial administration. I’m in touch with all the different partners that we’re working with – the locations, the artists… And of course I’m making sure that the festival is feasible from a financial point of view, so I’m also in touch with our fundraisers and with potential sponsors. There are a lot of things that need to be done!

EJ: Could you tell us how the DHF in 2012 is going to be different from the first one in 2010? What changes are you making for the second edition?

GW: Basically, what we are trying to do is to take everything that was great about the first festival and add a bit on top. First, we’re going to make the festival a bit longer. It will go from Tuesday to Sunday and not stop on Saturday, which was a bit of a shame last time, because it ruined the “last festival weekend” atmosphere.

Internally, we’re very focused on making things more professional. The first festival was intended as a one-time event, disregarding that there might be additional festivals. Now what we’re trying to do is set up an organization that is able to produce this festival not just once or twice but which will be around for years to come.

EJ: What do you have to do to make an organization more professional?

GW: If you’re planning a one-time event, you’re mainly focused on getting things done. The mindset is, “Okay, we have to organize this, do it… no matter what, do it in whatever way we can to achieve the goal.” But, this time, I think we’re really trying to figure out the best way to do things and then to make a record of it so we can repeat it for the third edition. It makes us focus not only on whatwe’re trying to achieve but also on how we’re going to achieve it. That’s a huge change in focus for us.

Also, we’re trying to get more people on board than last time. You yourself are of course an excellent example, in the sense that you’re involved in a much earlier stage now. We’re trying to do this with more people. We’re trying to get people outside the board of directors to work on different aspects of the festival, the composition contest for example. That’s going to help us have a better overview on all our activities, and also it gets more work done.

As far as other changes for the week of the festival itself, we’re planning in more time for the competition rounds. Especially for the quarter-finals, there’s going to be more time to hear everybody play. For the finals, we’re venturing into a much larger venue than the Utrecht Conservatory, where we were last time. We’ll also have more venues for the concerts. Hopefully, we’ll have space for a lot more people to visit the festival.

Another change is the prize money. The amounts are going to be a lot bigger than they were last time, in addition to a more extended concert tour for the first prize winner. That’s one thing that is going to help put us (at least we hope) in the top harp competitions worldwide.

EJ: But the DHF has some major differences from other harp competitions, one of them being that your funding is mainly coming from sources outside the harp community, is that right?

GW:  Yes, we’re really trying to focus more on companies outside of the harp spectrum. I think that’s something important, so that we can expand the support of the harp community in general to organizations not necessarily associated with the harp.

You see, we have two main goals that we’ve set for ourselves. The first is to organize a competition that is fair and transparent. The second goal is to promote the harp, especially here in the Netherlands, but also outside, if possible. Getting all these sponsors on board is a way of achieving that. If we manage to get a large company in the Netherlands interested in doing something with harp, that is already a step on the way to achieving more wide-spread knowledge of what the harp can actually do.

In the end it all boils down to building a great platform for being able to have this competition and festival in the coming years, promoting the participants and helping them get better along the way, and also promoting the harp. It’s these things that are the basis of what we’re trying to achieve here. I’m really looking forward to do my part in that!

For those of you I’m meeting for the first time, I am a harpist, originally from America and subsequently based in France. I met Remy – artistic director of the Dutch Harp Festival – as he was preparing the first edition of the festival and as I was discovering unexpected levels of success blogging about my experience at the International Harp Competition in Israel, in 2009. Together we devised the idea of having me come out to Utrecht to do the same thing for the competition he was creating there, in an official capacity.

Since last year, I have moved to Thailand, where I have an amazing job teaching at Mahidol University College of Music in Bangkok and playing with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite the move, I am eager to maintain my connection to the Dutch harpists, whom I find to be a vibrant source of inspiration and a guiding star for our generation, and so I’m very excited to be back on board.

After having been in Amsterdam for a few days, on February 4th I played my first concert at the Vredenburg Leeuwenburg in Utrecht. I was pleasantly surprised by the many people that came, and their love for music was really refreshing because it’s something I don’t see very often back in the States. Even though the program ran longer than expected, the audience was still quite enthusiastic, and I really felt that the success of the first concert would extend to the next six.

The highlights of the tour were the concerts in Utrecht, Eindhoven, and Leusden, and the final private concert in the Stadhuis van Utrecht. Although I did enjoy performing the solo programme, collaborating with Rosanne Philippens (violin) and Remy was probably the most enjoyable part of the tour. Rosanne is not only a really passionate violinist, but she also has a fun, bubbly personality. Rehearsals with her were never tedious! Also, Remy and I played duets for the Stadhuis concert, and because I had not played any harp duets for a really long time, I relished the experience, and now, I’m interested in learning more duets! Like Rosanne, Remy is a wonderful player, and we had way too much fun practicing John Thomas’s Cambria and also Shostakovich’s Polka.

In addition to all the harp activities, I also was given the opportunity to participate in a media training session. Because I’m a generally more reserved person, I find public speaking and interviews quite intimidating. The training made me realise that audiences appreciate musicians who make the effort to add a personal touch to the concert by talking about the pieces in the programme. Although this may seem trivial, smiling is probably one of the most important aspects of stage performance, so yes, I do need to smile more! Besides the media training, I took some lessons with Joyce Tan, a violin professor at the Utrechts Conservatorium who also specializes in audition training and a fascinating technique of “Performing Through Inner Power”. With me, she worked mostly on vocal articulation, and we practiced shouting; I haven’t quite reached the desired volume, but I’m working on doing so!

Despite the busyness of all the concerts, rehearsals, lessons, and even homework, I was really pleased with the success of the whole organization. Of course, I would not have been able to complete the tour without the assistance of Remy, Jos, Erika, Raoul, and so many others. Thank you for making everything possible, and all the best for the next Dutch Harp Festival!