Conductor,
musicologist &
artistic director.

Anthony Scheffer is a Dutch conductor, musicologist and musician whose work is driven by curiosity about the people who created music, the worlds they inhabited and what their work can mean to listeners today. Combining academic research with artistic imagination, he approaches musical performance as an encounter between past and present.

Born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, Scheffer began his musical career in his hometown as a cantor and organist. He gained his first conducting experience with Katholiek Kamerkoor Amersfoort, where his work centred on sacred music in its liturgical context. While studying Liberal Arts and Sciences and Musicology at Utrecht University, he developed an interdisciplinary perspective that continues to shape his work, bringing music into dialogue with history, theology and culture. During this period, he founded Ensemble Illustre, for which he developed concert programmes that presented Baroque repertoire within its wider context. In the 2018/19 season, he served as an assistant to the music staff at Dutch National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam, gaining professional experience with a broad operatic repertoire.

Scheffer’s repertoire spans more than a millennium of Western music, encompassing Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, Baroque and Classical repertoire, music of the Romantic era, opera and twentieth-century works. As a conductor, harpsichordist, singer and violinist, he approaches each musical tradition on its own terms, informed by the context from which it emerged. This broad artistic practice led him to establish Faelix in 2022. Bringing together professional musicians from around the world, the collective draws on the principles of historically informed performance to create compelling concert experiences for contemporary audiences. Through Faelix, scholarly insight and artistic expression come together in performances that illuminate both the music itself and the human stories behind it.

Scheffer’s commitment to storytelling and education extends beyond the concert hall through podcasting and writing. In 2023, he created the podcast Altijd weer die Bach in collaboration with EO and NPO Klassiek. The series looks beyond the familiar image of Johann Sebastian Bach as an untouchable genius to explore the humanity behind the music, connecting his compositions with his life, his world and the experiences that shaped him. De Werelden van Bachs Matthäus Passion marks Scheffer’s debut as an author. In the book, he brings together his practical experience as a conductor with research in cultural history and musicology, revealing the many worlds that converge in Bach’s masterpiece.

Scheffer’s approach is deliberately pragmatic: research matters when it changes how musicians perform and how listeners experience music. For him, music is both a communal art and a personal form of expression through which people create and share meaning. By uniting research, performance practice and artistic imagination, he seeks to create musical experiences that are historically grounded, personally resonant and alive to the present day.

Scheffer is currently conductor of Capella Amersfoort, Concertkoor Baarn and the Koninklijke Oratorium Vereniging Utrecht. He has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Utrechts Studenten Koor en Orkest, Cantate op de Brink in Hilversum, Vocaal Ensemble Coqu, Ensemble Quintessens, the Dudok Ensemble and Barok Ensemble Utrecht.