Simon Velthuis

My name is Simon Velthuis, a Dutch cellist from Haaksbergen in Twente. I moved to Amsterdam in 2011 to study at the conservatory there and completed my master’s degree at the same conservatory in September 2018 under Dmitri Ferschtman and Maarten Mostert.

These days, I work as a freelance cellist and take on a wide variety of projects, with chamber music and orchestral performance taking center stage. I’m very happy with this, because these are the two things I love doing most: chamber music because of the intimacy between the different players and the music itself, Orchestral playing because of being “a small cog” in a massive, incredibly cool, bombastic whole (think, for example, of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony).

Since March 2018, I’ve been playing a cello from the Musical Instrument Fund, and I clearly remember being allowed to try out cellos at the Musical Instrument Fund’s office—there were five cellos in the room that I could try. This cello (“my cello”) was the first one to catch my attention and also the first one I played. The instrument still felt a bit closed off, but in my opinion, the warmth of the sound it produced was something the other cellos simply couldn’t match, so I decided fairly quickly to go with this one. Today, I’m very happy with it and take great pleasure in playing this cello!