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I was born in 1965 in Assen, the Netherlands. My parents, both teachers, moved to Groenlo, a small town in the east of the Netherlands when I was one year old. When I was 6 years old, I started my musical training in my hometown Groenlo with Mr Luttikholt. After a year I started taking piano lessons with Mrs Van Erp, who gave me a thorough training on the instrument. Soon I decided that my life was to be as a musician. My first public appearance as a singer was in church, singing at my first communion. At 16 I did my first 'production' with the school cabaret, doing several sketches and songs, both in ensemble and solo. The enormous joy I experienced from singing made me take singing lessons and I decided to prepare for the admission exams for the conservatorium, both piano and voice. The fact that singing now equalled playing the piano caused much despair to Mrs van Erp who urged me to dedicate myself to the piano only. I decided against that though and did admission exams for the conservatorium for piano and voice and got accepted for both. In 1983 I started at the conservatorium at Enschede studying voice with Ank Reinders and Anne Haenen. I studied piano with Benno Pierweyer. After a year I dropped piano as a major and focussed completely on studying voice. In 1986 I stopped my training at the conservatorium. Being very young , I found myself not totally ready for the commitment to life as a singer so I decided to make a rigid change and started working as a travel guide in Spain, learning spanish while there. After a year I started working for Lufthansa as a flightattendant. Travelling all over the world enabled me to get acquainted with all the major opera houses. The amount of life experience, coming along with this job is unexpressable. A few years ago I started focussing again completely on music, learning the art and passing it on, and so last year I graduated for the musical theory exams at the NSVM. I hope to graduate on Voice and the teaching skills in June 2001. My current singing teacher is Ron Murdock, who is also a teacher of the Alexander technique. I am studying piano with Robijn Tilanus, author of the book Kwintessence. |