Notes on this instrument

After I graduated in the Netherlands, I studied with Carina Raschèr, in Germany. I obviously had heard about the Raschèr Quartet as a student, and had become very curious about the group and the tradition. Nobody could really tell me that much about it, and so when the Quartet came to Holland in 1999 to perform at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, I decided to hear them play! I was fascinated. After the concert I wanted to meet the players, which were at that time Carina Raschèr, Harry White, Bruce Weinberger and Kenneth Coon, so I tried to go backstage. At that point, an employee of the Concertgebouw stopped me, and told me I wasn’t allowed to go to the backstage area. Frankly this puzzled me, and I was so eager to meet the Quartet that I sized the usher up, and thought that in case of a brawl I would be OK ;). I went ahead and climbed the stairs to the dressing rooms, and met the Raschèr Quartet, who were extremely nice to me. They invited me to a course they were going to do a bit later that year, and the rest is history!

After this, I found me this Buescher alto, that I still use as my main alto. After I bought it, it was first overhauled by master repairman Peter Neff in Cologne, Germany, who passed away sadly a few years ago. He is sorely missed. In 2019, Adrian Vilaboa Martinez overhauled the instrument again, when we got ready for a number of performances of John Adams’ “Nixon in China” with the opera in Stuttgart, Germany.