A Hidden Stage on the Ritsevoort
Some concert halls announce themselves with marble and chandeliers. De Alkenaer keeps its secret behind a bookshop door, in a house that has stood on the same narrow plot for centuries.
You find it on the Ritsevoort, one of Alkmaar's oldest streets, behind an ornate gabled façade that looks as if it has a story to tell. Inside, the air smells of paper and time. Shelves rise on every side, filled with forgotten novels, travel journals, poetry in faded bindings, books that have passed through many hands and kept a little of each. You walk slowly, because a house like this asks you to. And then, at the back, past the last stack of stories, a room opens up that you would never have guessed was there.
It is an intimate hall, small enough that every breath carries, warm enough that the audience feels less like spectators and more like guests. Throughout the year it fills with readings, debates, concerts and conversation. But the house around it has a story older than any book on its shelves.
The Ritsevoort was already a street at the end of the Middle Ages, a road leading into the town from outside its walls. In the sixteenth century the city wall moved outward and embraced it, and the street became one of the ways in: to the great church of Saint Lawrence, to the convents, to the market. Behind its narrow façades ran long, deep plots, and on a map of 1670 the house that is now De Alkenaer is already drawn there, a modest two-storey building with its roof turned towards the street.
In 1892 it was given a new face, richly ornamented in the neo-Renaissance style, and it has worn that face ever since while the life inside kept changing. A grocer sold coffee here. A shopkeeper's wife sold brushes and household goods. A plumber's firm sold boilers. For a few years there were toy trains in the window, then tools, then carpets, sold by none other than the Ajax footballer Piet Keizer. Around 1974 the first antique dealer arrived, and in 1989 the house became De Alkenaer, a bookshop so full that its shelves held some thirty thousand volumes.
The hall behind it is the newest chapter. Where once there was only a back garden, a salon has been built for around a hundred listeners, a room where the old house finally found its voice.
On 27 May, Louise and Ramon invite you to walk through five centuries of Alkmaar, past a hundred years of shopkeepers and thousands of books, to the music waiting at the back.
Further details about the programme, venue and tickets will follow soon.