He was born in Heiloo (Netherlands) in 1961. He studied at the Sweelinck Conservatory with Koos Verheul and Harris Starreveld in Amsterdam, and later at the Banff Center for Arts with Geoffrey Gilbert in Alberta, Canada.
He has received numerous awards, such as the second prize in the Willem Pipjer competition with pianist Bernd Brackman (1981), the Special Jury Prize in the Jean-Pierre Rampal competition in Paris (1987), and an Edison for his recordings of his repertoire of contemporary Dutch music for flute and piano, which he won again with Brackman (1997). In 1998, the Boston Globe called him “Musician of the Year.”
His professional career as a performer has been very intense. He has been a member of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the European Community Youth Orchestra, under the direction of Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein. Since 1997, he has been principal flute of the Boston Symphony and, since 2004, of the Mozart and Lucerne Festival orchestras. He has performed as a soloist with the Amsterdam, The Hague, and Berlin symphonies; the Royal Concertgebouw, Boston Symphony, and Boston Baroque Orchestra. He has performed concertos by Mozart, Jolivet, Martin, Gubaidulina, Bernstein, and Ligeti, under the direction of Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa, Bernhard Haitink, and Pierre Boulez.
As for chamber music, he has played alongside cellist Iseut Chuat and collaborated with the Indomeno, Viotta, and Gaudier ensembles; the Ludwig Trio and the Orlando and Amati quartets. He has performed concertos composed for him by Bernhard Heiden and Paul Desenne, and between 1989 and 1997 he was principal flute of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
He has made several recordings for the Philips, Decca, DG, Vanguard Classics, Schwann-Koch, Pony Canyon, NM-Classics, and Boston Records record labels. In 2004, he recorded Mozart’s flute concertos with the Boston Baroque Orchestra for Telarc.
In addition to his activity as an artist, he has developed a very active academic and teaching career. He has been a professor at the Rotterdam Conservatory (1988-1994), Indiana University (1994-1997), Boston University and New England Conservatory (1997-2001), as well as at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule in Berlin. Since 2002, he has been a professor of flute at the Geneva Conservatory and since 2006 he has been a guest artist in the Wind Department of the Madrid Chamber Music Institute. Since 2009, he has been a professor of the Flute Chair at the Reina Sofía School of Music.