How do you learn to sing and conduct at the highest European level when you’ve just graduated from the conservatory? Tenso CONNECT gives young singers and conductors the answer: a traineeship with a top choir, an international network, and a stage to show what they can do. Cappella Amsterdam is not only a participating choir but also host of the project. This is exactly how we want choral music to grow: by giving talent a fair chance within a living network of makers.
What Tenso CONNECT does
Tenso CONNECT is a project of Tenso Network Europe, co-funded by the European Union. The programme offers young singers and conductors a focused traineeship with one of the network’s top choirs, supplemented by online training on topics such as leadership and social impact through the digital platform CONNECTspace. The goal is to prepare them as professional “cultural communicators”, not just as musicians. One of the participants was paired with Cappella Amsterdam and spent a week working with conductors Daniel Reuss and Krista Audere on Bach and Pärt, repertoire for which the choir is internationally known. Traineeships like this are exactly what the project is about: not just singing under supervision, but taking part in the day-to-day practice of a professional choir.
Tensodays in Amsterdam
Tenso CONNECT and Tenso Network Europe: the bigger picture
Tenso CONNECT is one programme strand within Tenso Network Europe, the European network of fifteen professional chamber choirs from eleven countries. The name Tenso comes from the medieval troubadour tradition and roughly means “dialogue between singers”: a fitting name for a network that has been building bridges between choirs, conductors and generations since 2003. Cappella Amsterdam has been an active member since that year and, together with the Netherlands Chamber Choir among others, represents the Dutch presence within Tenso.
Besides CONNECT, Tenso organises the Tenso Days, a recurring festival held in various European cities until 2016, with Amsterdam hosting the final edition, as well as the Masterclass for Conductors, the Young Composers Workshop and the Tenso Professionals Meeting. All these activities share the same aim: giving new repertoire and new talent a place in the international choral world.
Tensodays in Amsterdam
Re:CONNECT: the finale of Tenso CONNECT in Ankara
In October 2025, Tenso CONNECT reached its culmination at the Re:CONNECT Conference in Ankara, organised in collaboration with the Turkish State Choir. Over three days, concerts, workshops and talks alternated, bringing together conductors, singers and choral enthusiasts from across Europe. On behalf of Cappella Amsterdam, then managing director Mark Walraven spoke about leadership and sustainability in choirs, and about how audiences discover choirs today: no longer only through the season programme, but also through playlists and short videos. That topic touches directly on a question many choirs are grappling with: how do you reach an audience that increasingly comes across music through an algorithm rather than a concert announcement?
In our DNA
Cappella Amsterdam believes that choral music only stays alive if there is room for new voices. Our involvement in Tenso, and in Tenso CONNECT specifically, is a direct expression of that: we give young singers and conductors access to our repertoire, our way of working and our network, and in turn we learn from their perspective on the future of choral music. For us, talent development is not a side issue next to the concert calendar, but one of the ways we pass our artistic signature on to the next generation.
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