Each quarter, we ask our scholarship students for an update: what have they been working on? What challenges have they faced, and what successes have they achieved? We selected a few stories to share with you. Below, you’ll find their updates along with a video link, so you can see and hear them perform.
Update from the Excellent students
"Things are going very well here in the DNOA; I have entered my final term, and I am busier than ever! I have performed in many operas and concerts in venues across the Netherlands, including Amare, Het Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. I look forward to my next performance of scenes from Bizet’s Carmen, where I will be performing Frasquita.
I very much look forward to travelling back to Ireland for the month of May, whereby I will be making my professional operatic debut with the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival in the role of Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Pergolesi - A Serpina Penserete
with Isaac Lam, piano
I performed this aria in term one, in Pergolesi’s opera La Serva Padrona. I got to perform it again in February in Het Concertgebouw Kleine Zaal."
"Everything is going well! I had lessons with two outside teachers that really helped me to keep developing and understanding the topic that I chose. I am really happy with how this year started and I am looking forward to doing more in the upcoming months.
Imanol Emede - Withering
I performed this new piece together with my trio at the New Tide Festival in Amare on 6 March."
"I am doing very well, adapting more and more every day. Over the last few months, I have been involved in various projects in Amsterdam, The Hague and Maastricht. I have had the opportunity to participate in some very interesting projects, such as Louis Andriessen's De Materie, where I had the opportunity to conduct for the first time at Het Concertgebouw. In January, I played a small piano recital at The Social Hub, which I also enjoyed very much. This March, I am going to start an opera workshop with DNOA in Amsterdam. I finished my Dutch course at KABK and am improving my language skills!
I am going to have an audition in London this month to conduct some projects with an orchestra there, and last week, together with the KC Symphony Orchestra and Sam Weller, we put together a very interesting programme of music by Thomas Adès, Julia Wolf and Dmitri Kourliandski. We also recorded some pieces by composition students together with the Residentie Orkest ensemble.
Julia Wolf - Pretty
with KC Symphony Orchestra
With every new experience I have, I am increasingly grateful for the privilege of being here and also for having your support and trust in my process. Thank you so much!"
"I am currently finishing my research project. I am pleased with how it is turning out, and I believe that, artistically and in terms of decision-making, the project has helped me to improve. Now that I am finishing my master's degree, I am beginning to see a change in the way I understand artistic processes as something much more profound than I would have achieved without this training.
I have won a place in Intrada. This programme, organized by five Baroque orchestras (Le Banquet Céleste, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, B’Rock Orchestra, Dunedin Consort and Concerto Copenhagen), only selects three candidates regardless of the instrument they play. This is great news and, at the same time, job security for my first year outside of academia, something I am very excited about."
"The research is progressing very well. While still in exploratory stage, after the winter break I have been able to focus more intensively on specific aspects of the project. I concentrated on investigating the physiology of listening and psychoacoustics — particularly inner-ear distortion — and its relationship to specific frequency ranges. I spent several weeks developing practical coding tools and composing a series of short etudes to explore these phenomena in practice. These rather technical aspects have opened a new layer of material thinking in my work, where perception itself becomes an active compositional parameter rather than just a by-product of sound. These explorations led to the formulation of several important questions and connections of material and space and future work will be about integrating them into my music.
I finalized my first piece this year. It was presented in a concert in the Acousmonium in the Conservatoriumzaal. This performance is a great possibility for me to share the preliminary musical results. It will provide me with further insight into the relationship between sonic materiality and spatial perception since this sound system is unique. It meant working with a large, diffused loudspeaker orchestra, and the timbral aspects of the piece were co-shaped with the various speakers and acoustics of the concert hall."
About the Excellence scholarship programme at the Royal Conservatoire
We would like to thank the private donors, funds and corporate partners whose generous contributions make the scholarship programme possible: Fonds 1999, the Ritsema van Eck Fonds, the Keep an Eye Foundation, the Corendon Foundation and the Revoir Group.
Fundraising for the scholarship programme and special projects is coordinated by the Royal Conservatoire Fund (also: Fonds KC). Fonds KC was established in 2024 through the merger of three support foundations: the Fund for Excellence of the Royal Conservatoire, the Instrument Fund of the Royal Conservatoire and the Friends of the Royal Conservatoire.
For the 2024–2025 academic year, Fonds KC has awarded scholarships to students who achieved exceptional results in their entrance examinations for a master’s programme at the Royal Conservatoire.
Scholarship candidates are nominated by the Head of the relevant department based on their (outstanding) entrance examination for the Master’s programme and the quality of their Master (research) plan. Excellence Scholarships are in principle awarded for the full duration of the two-year Master’s programme, subject to the availability of funds.
In addition to the Excellence Scholarships, the Royal Conservatoire is awarding three NL Scholarships this year, made possible by NUFFIC. The same selection criteria—entrance examination and Master plan—apply to both scholarships. For the NL Scholarship, students must also meet the additional requirement of holding a non-EEA nationality and studying in the Netherlands for the first time. The NL Scholarship is awarded for one year; if the student shows satisfactory progress and if funding allows, an Excellence Scholarship is granted for the second year. Both scholarships are equivalent to the applicable tuition fee for the student.
Thanks to the support of Fonds 1999, six students have received additional high-value scholarships: five Fonds 1999 Top Scholarships of €12,000 and one Fonds 1999 Development Scholarship of €15,000. These were awarded to students whose talent and creativity stood out even among an already excellent group.
Finally, two students were awarded a Keep an Eye Talent Award of €10,000 each, distributed over the two years of their Master’s studies.
