On stage
every week.

I’m principal cor anglais in the Hessisches Staatsorchester at the Staatstheater Wiesbaden. The work is mostly opera, with symphony concerts and ballet alongside, and I’m actively involved in organising and playing the chamber music series — programme curation, rehearsals, the small-room intimacy that the pit doesn’t always allow.

My favourite composers in the pit are Puccini, R. Strauss, Wagner and Mozart; for orchestral work, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schumann and Schubert. The cor anglais has some of the most beautiful solos in the literature — the opening of Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde, Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, the second movement of Dvořák’s From the New World. Playing any of those is a quiet privilege.

I’ve also performed as a guest with orchestras in most major cities in Germany. The route to here ran through three cities — studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa, then Madrid, Spain, and finally Weimar, Germany.

A typical week shifts constantly between rehearsals, performances, and concerts — several productions running in parallel, each with its own score, its own colleagues on stage, its own stakes. You learn to switch context with full attention, stay prepared at all times, and accept the pressure of performing regularly as part of the work itself rather than the exception. That’s where I learned most of what I now bring to software. Preparation beats talent. A single careless mistake can ruin days of rehearsal the same way a single missed edge case can ruin weeks of development.

When I take on a web project, I treat your release date the way I treat a concert date — fixed, public, and not negotiable.

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Curious how the discipline of the pit translates to a freelance engagement? The main page has the stack, the services, and the invoice you can expect.