Last October Bart de Neeve passed away, Concertzender-colleague from the very start Sem de Jong shares memories and anecdotes about him.
Our faithful colleague Bart de Neeve passed away recently. I was very close to Bart, we worked together for 18 years. He started in 2000 working for my department at the time, Concert Recordings. He completed a huge job: digitising and archiving 5000 recordings. Among them were a lot of old digital tapes and it required huge amounts of patience to deal with them. There was always something that didn’t work, but Bart had that patience. He appeared to have a very relaxed attitude to life. If it wasn’t going well, or the computer didn’t work yet again, he just shrugged his shoulders and went home. He’d be back the next week, hopeful that it would all work this time.
I remember fondly the times we played together, him on the piano, me on the clarinet. That was in the Muziekcentrum van de Omroep, where the Concertzender was located for a few years. During pauses we’d go to a concert hall where there was a fine piano. Bart would borrow music from the library and we’d play it through. Our objective : the fun of sight reading and getting to know as much music as possible. I remember we once played a very nice piece by Germaine Tailleferre I didn’t know. Play it through twice and then onto the next sonata !
As well as his archive work Bart was also a presenter and programme maker. You can still hear his voice in the ‘De Wandeling’ on Tuesday mornings from 09.00. We’ll keep repeating his programmes for quite a while.
