Alice (1998*) is Sketch351’s cellist and the group’s only non-Portuguese member. Born in the mountains of northern Italy, she first studied piano but soon switched to cello, mostly because she wanted an instrument she could carry around. Ironically, this is now her least favourite thing about playing this instrument and she dreads having to drag her cello on public transportation. If you find this hard to believe just join her for some rehearsals and she’ll make sure you know about it in the form of complaining.

Alice

As a child, Alice’s favorite stage was the woods, performing for audiences of trees and thoroughly confused birds. Always curious about the full range of sounds her cello could produce, she once pushed her little sister’s patience so far that it ended with the secret destruction of Alice’s bow after one too many “experimental” tones. In Sketch351, she finally found a perfect – and bow-safe – space to continue her childhood sonic experiments. This delicate balance, however, is occasionally disrupted by rumbling percussion: after nearly being blown off a mountain by a storm as a child, Alice developed a fear of such sounds. However, perhaps working with a percussionist so often has been in a way therapeutic?

After years studying at conservatories in Bergamo, Groningen, and The Hague, she now lives somewhere between music and an ever-expanding (and arguably way too long) list of hobbies that includes crochet, juggling, magic tricks, and invented alphabets. When these pursuits prove less than profitable, she finds time to perform at festivals such as the Aurora Festival, Sounds of Music Festival, Festival Musique de Chambre in Normandie, and the Groningen Muziekvereniging Festival, and to collaborate with groups including the Kamerorkest van het Noorden and the Dutch Eurythmy Dance Ensemble.

Daniel (1997*) is the trombone player and founder of Sketch351. He’s the group’s longest-standing member and was even voted “the nicest person in the ensemble” back in 2022 – a title that, surprisingly, stirred up a bit of controversy among the members at the time. Whenever his fellow humans show such animosity, Daniel just reminds himself that, even without owning a pet, all the neighborhood cats seem to follow him home anyway.

Daniel

Even though he was born and lived in Portugal for most of his life, he moved to the Netherlands in 2018. Some say his move was driven by a crippling fear of heights. The flatness of the Netherlands offers a rare kind of peace to a man who has spent most of his life denouncing the ladder as a fraudulent and illegitimate invention.

He has performed with the London Film Music Orchestra on their Netherlands/Belgium tour, collaborated repeatedly with Lisbon’s Metropolitan Orchestra playing works by Stravinsky, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, and Brahms, and has taken part in the project Operetta Land with De Nationale Opera, and  Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Aus Licht, and Meredith Monk’s Indra’s Net at The Holland Festival. Impressive as all that may sound, the undisputed highlight of his career remains the time he played Under the Sea while literally under the sea, traveling through the Eurotunnel.

Even though Daniel studied with great trombone players such as Tim Dowling, Sebastiaan Kemner, Ben van Dijk and Reinaldo Guerreiro, his greatest trombone inspiration, and the very reason he picked up the instrument, is none other than Snoopy.

Gonçalo (2001*) is Sketch351’s newly acquired percussionist. Although he’d been the ensemble’s star substitute for the past couple of years, the group eventually decided it was time to lower the average age – so they kicked out the former percussionist* in favor of Gonçalo, or, as his father prefers to call him, Guga. 

Gonçalo

As a kid he wasn’t sure if he should follow a career in table tennis or clarinet, his first instrument. More than a decade later, he is now freshly out of school where he took a master in percussion at Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag. Funnily enough, his background in percussion ended up improving his racket skills – after all, sound is a great cue for knowing when you’ve struck the ball just right.

Gonçalo performed with many estimated orchestras and ensembles such as Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest, Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest, Residentie Orkest HIIIT or Het Muziek. He still hasn’t decided if joining Sketch351 is a downgrade in his career path. 

It was brilliant ideas such as his great dream of tattooing his butt cheeks that brought him closer to the ensemble. He will be encouraged to explore this side of his brain more often working in Sketch. 

Despite being full of energy and always eager to take on transdisciplinary projects, Gonçalo is absolutely terrified at the thought of joining anything involving film projection as the moment a movie starts, he turns completely narcoleptic.

*note: no percussion player was hurt in the makings of this ensemble; we do love you Ricardo, even though you’re old.

Inês (1995*) is the pianist of Sketch351 and her biggest dream was to be a raccoon. As a child, she used to create little theater plays with her sisters and her younger cousin, often accompanied by music she performed herself on the piano. She had a bizarre obsession with making music – or sheer noise, depending on who was listening – out of trash and would “compose” weird songs with lyrics so odd that her family still uses them as prime material for gentle mockery.

Inês

These might be some of the reasons why Inês, after years of classical music training, tends to shy away from the traditional music formats and has been expanding her practice as a musician through interdisciplinary collaborations, projects with unusual instruments such as toy piano or other toy instruments and improvisation. She is fond of contemporary music – on which she has devoted a large part of her piano practice over the past few years – and was delighted to discover that, like her, György Ligeti was also afraid of spiders. In recent years, she has performed in Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, and France – a fact that still amuses her, considering that the first time she ever boarded a plane to go farther than France (given that she’s Portuguese and had always lived in Portugal until that point) was to the Netherlands in 2019, when she was almost 24. The majority of these performances were together with her “toy instrument contemporary music impro garage band” Novelo Vago and as a part of Vera Morais’ ensemble. Inês is usually held as an extremely serious person as her dry sarcastic humour doesn’t always translate. If you ever question her validity as a professional musician take into consideration that she holds two master degrees in performance – one taken in Portugal at ESMAE in Porto and the other in The Netherlands at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag.