Martin Fondse Voice Orchestra

Faces of Earth | Diamonds

The return of colonial jewelry is a contemporary topic. These pieces are often tied to the history of diamond mining and trade during the colonial era. The wealth of one comes at the expense of another. Faces of Earth | Diamonds tells a controversial story of brilliance and power.

Martin Fondse Voice Orchestra 

A hybrid ensemble formed by six women and six men. Featuring inspiring new musicians and a few familiar players. A balance between experience and emerging youth. Music where composition and improvisation are in tune with current events.

The female group Vox Sturnus adds an element to the orchestra’s music that enhances the project’s expressiveness: text.

Vox Sturnus is contemplative and offers a venomous commentary, incorporating poetry by composers such as Shakespeare (“My crown is in my heart, not on my head, not decked with diamonds and Indian stones” from Henry VI), like the chorus from a Greek tragedy.

The flexibility of this ensemble—almost every singer also plays an instrument, while others are multi-instrumental—creates an endless variety of colors and sounds. Martin is composing new pieces for Diamonds, following the Bimhuis Composition Commission in 2022.

Faces of Earth is a musical ode to trees that have endured wars, disasters, and human devastation.

It explores how trees — silent witnesses of history — might speak through sound.
From the ginkgo trees that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima to the oak of Guernica, these living monuments carry stories of endurance, loss, and renewal.
The music of Faces of Earth gives voice to what trees tell us about time, resilience, and the power to heal.

Trees are the oldest living witnesses of our civilization.
They recover slowly, following a rhythm that moves counter to human haste.

Faces of Earth translates that rhythm — the breath of the planet — into music: not as landscape painting, but as a spiritual exploration of duration, silence, resonance, and scar.
The compositions move between stillness and eruption, between rooting and release.
They reveal the paradox of growth through destruction — how life restores itself, even after the deepest wound.

The cycle unfolds as a series of musical portraits of trees, created in close collaboration with the individual musicians of the Martin Fondse Voice Orchestra.
Each musician gives sound to their chosen tree — a personal “voice from the forest.”
The lyrics trace the trees’ annual rings and draw from poetry of their eras: from the cedar hymns of Gilgamesh to the words of Shakespeare and the songs of Indigenous poets who sing of time as a circle.

Trees speak in centuries; we speak in years.
Their silence is not emptiness, but memory.

Faces of Earth listens to that silence — and translates it into music.

Martin Fondse – piano, Fender Rhodes, vibrandoneon

Miguel Boelens – alto sax, bass clarinet

Eric van der Westen – double bass

Dirk Peter Koelsch – drums

Romain Bly – French horn, trumpet

Q – Flute, Bass Flute, Vocals

Vox Sturnus:

Margriet Sjoerdsma – vocals

Maryana Golovchenko – vocals

Julia Werner – vocals

Anne-Marie Roel Messerschmidt – vocals

Thora Sveinsdottir – vocals, viola

Annie Tangberg – vocals, cello