EMMA KOK – VOILÀ (LIVE WITH ANDRÉ RIEU) | FIRST TIME REACTION (HOLY SMOKES…)

Comments · 43

• DE

  @dennisharnish9063 · 4 months ago

  She is from the Netherlands so her first language is Dutch. I have listened to her sing in Dutch German, French, and English.

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• LR

  @LR_EK-s8p · 4 months ago

  I always love to see the raw emotion Emma's voice has upon people listening to her for the first time. She's a natural storyteller who always lives the lyrics. Very focused and expressive. She makes it look effortless. The conductor, Andre Rieu was so impressed he invited Emma to go along with his orchestra as guest artist to tour through Europe, the Mideast, Central America.. After 2 1/2 years and nearly 200 concert dates, Emma with the blessing of Andre, has begun her solo career. She sold out consecutive massively successful shows at the venerable Concertgebouw Theater in Amsterdam and is presently touring theaters through her native Netherlands with an additional 28 dates on the schedule. On a sad note, yesterday was the funeral of Emma's best friend who was lost to cancer. They bonded over shared health experiences.

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• KA

  @Karsten-i8r · 4 months ago

  Hi you three, if you&apos;ve developed a taste for it. Emma&apos;s debut concert with 18 songs from October can be found on her own channel, or check out this title: She Used To Be Mine | Live In Concertgebouw. ​​The songs are all listed without titles. It should also be added that you watch &quot;Dancing on the Stars&quot; from 2024. Emma speaks and sings English perfectly. She holds a note for 12 seconds here. By the way, like her brother Enzo (who can be seen at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrFN_cBjqE&amp;t=74">1:14</a>), she is also a violinist and plays piano. Emma also writes and composes her own songs. One of them is Jade: &quot;Jade | Live In Concertgebouw&quot;. Jade died of cancer last Friday. Emma sang at her funeral yesterday at Jade&apos;s request. Her brother Enzo can be seen with Emma in this title. Also from her concert: &quot;Imagine | Live In Concertgebouw&quot;. Emma toured with Andre for almost three years, seeing everything and gaining touring experience. In October, she put everything she had learned from him into practice at her first two concerts. She planned and organized both of them herself. She is currently on a theater tour in the Netherlands. She takes 45-minute breaks during her concerts because she needs to use her breast pump, as she only has the energy for two hours. The formula she receives doesn&apos;t provide much energy, but she manages. Emma is very well-known worldwide; she has 2.1 million followers on Instagram. She will become a great artist.😀

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• MI

  @mikevanbrouwershaven9118 · 4 months ago

  Look at her YouTube channel for a lot more music like this. She is 18 now and a lady. Thans for the reaction ❤

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• LA

  @lazerx1828 · 4 months ago (edited)

  Thanks SO much for this one guys, Emma is just...something else. She just turned 18 in March and has already lived and experienced more than most adults, including some things that no one, especially a young girl, should have to deal with. A bit more exposition on Emma&apos;s condition:<br> &nbsp; &nbsp; Emma was born with gastroparesis, a very rare condition in which the stomach is paralyzed and cannot digest food. Since she was nine months old she has lived on tube feeding; two tubes deliver nutrients directly to her stomach and intestine. The nutrients are delivered via two small pumps that she carries around in a backpack, twenty-two hours a day. She disconnects before she goes onstage and her mother waits backstage to help her reconnect afterwards. Her tube feeding also leaves her with little energy, she travels with a wheelchair for when she can&apos;t walk. &nbsp;<br> &nbsp; &nbsp; Every five months she has to have the connections and internal tubes changed but she refuses anesthetic as she is afraid that the intubation tube might damage her vocal cords. On a recent visit the guide wire that they use to place the tubes got stuck inside her and a fifteen-minute procedure became an hour, Emma was in a panic and agony the entire time. <br> &nbsp; &nbsp; Emma&apos;s condition also slowed her growth rate, she is petite for her age. &nbsp;When she was younger she had to use a child-sized walker to carry the pumps around in school. She was teased and bullied, called names like &quot;gnome&quot; and &quot;grandma&quot;. She eventually left school and had private tutoring. To this day she has trust issues and finds it hard to make friends.<br> &nbsp; &nbsp; VOILA, by Barbara Pravi from France, was written for the Eurovision Song Contest 2021 (it placed second). Ms. Pravi is a victim of domestic abuse. The song is about vulnerability, strength, and self-acceptance, saying &quot;This is me. Here I am. Accept me for what I am, voilà.&quot;. &nbsp;Emma does not speak French, but she felt a strong connection to the lyrics, so she learned the song phonetically. She has said in interviews that the only time she forgets that she is sick is when she&apos;s onstage singing. Andre Rieu invited her to join his World Tour, which she gladly accepted. She said that she loved being on the tour, the only thing that she didn&apos;t like was group meals, when the entire cast sat and ate the food of the country they were in. It must be torture to watch people bond and share over food, and just be a spectator, I can&apos;t even imagine. That&apos;s why Emma comes across as an &quot;old soul&quot;, she has gone (and still goes) through a singularly different life than most people.<br>Here&apos;s the same performance with English subtitles, worth checking out as it hammers home why she chose the song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=telyzClalVs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=telyzClalVs</a>

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• GE

  @Gert-Just-Jensen · 4 months ago (edited)

  At 3.44 they film her father, you can almost see him thinking: Did i help to create that??🙂Rieu has so much confidence in her talent, that he let her start without music, later change the key without music, and is just watching her, to convey what she`s doing, to the orchestra, but she proves him right.

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• GE

  @Gert-Just-Jensen · 4 months ago (edited)

  One more thing, that is an intelligent crowd, not a cellphone in sight, just people paying attention, to what`s happening on stage.🙂

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• MA

  @Mars-is4un · 4 months ago

  🤗🍒🌹 well done guys, listen also to Emma&apos;s Hallelujah, Imagine, Dancing on the Stars etc 🙏🏻

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• RO

  @roeloftooms · 4 months ago

  The song was a France Eurovision song contest song and chosen bij Andre because it fits to her life. The lyrics is a bit like &quot;look at me, this is me&quot;. She went on a world tour with Andre and after a year she got a new song with Andre &quot;dancing on the stars&quot;. Recently she gave her 1st concert, the songs can be found on the channel of the Dutch MAX broadcast station, &quot;This is me&quot; as the last song of that concert was a huge show.<br>But about 10 years before this performance Andre had a 10 year old kid on that same stage singing opera. Her name is Amira Willighagen and the video can be found on Andre his channel, it has currently over 100 million views, for sure also one to watch.

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• DO

  @dolfy1962 · 4 months ago

  Thanks for your comment, It starts with goosebumps and ends with tears. &nbsp;This is a master piece and the beginning of a breakthrough for Emma worldwide. In a year&apos;s time she has done beautiful performances and they can be seen on youtube. For example 1 year later at the Vrijthof in Maastricht dancing on the stars. ( <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll1uR_HUOP8">https://youtu.be/Ll1uR_HUOP8?si=JzSdJxNvnrtOk3XP</a> &nbsp;) When Emma sings (silence) a gap of total silence falls on the square. No cough or anything of sound, the audience 12500 people in trance. when she finishes singing a standing ovation from the audience and orchestra for several minutes. Emma doesn&apos;t speak French and she had a little bit French Lessons at school and helped by a French lady &nbsp;, this is how she did it. Hope you can follow it but it&apos;s funny how Emma learned the lyrics of VOILA ( <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W8feOFomG14">https://youtube.com/shorts/W8feOFomG14?si=OkDIKJAN1XEfXvtt</a> ) &nbsp;This version is with subtitles, Here you can read how profound the text is and how Emma conveys these emotions to the audience. ( &nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=telyzClalVs">https://youtu.be/telyzClalVs?si=s4gcQcA4IyF84v12</a> &nbsp;) &nbsp; Greetings from the Netherlands

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• TH

  @TheDutchMusicRepository · 4 months ago

  Thanks for the well presented and considered reaction. Emma is an extraordinary talent. Tube fed since she was 9 months old, Emma has never eaten a meal in her entire life, as a consequence she is smaller than average children of her age. She is only 5ft tall now, slightly less in the video you showed. Bullied at school because of her feeding tubes/pumps and her small stature which continued even after changing schools. Now just recently turned 18 Emma has risen above all this to become something of a national treasure in The Netherlands.<br>As Andre Rieu said, Emma had won The Voice Kids in The Netherlands. This was as we were emerging from the Covid pandemic in early 2021 and saw Emma coming out on top of 3000 initial entrants. Twelve months earlier she had made her formal singing debut in concerts organised by her brother to support musicians and artists impacted by the Pandemic. With no formal training her 12 year old voice blows my mind. &nbsp;Emma&apos;s slight sadness with her experience on &apos;The Voice&apos; was that there was no live studio audience. So when in late 2022 she was approached by the producers of another tv talent show, &apos;Ministars&apos;, after some reticence, she agreed to take part. She sang this song Voila in the final and unsurprisingly she once again won. Andre Rieu saw that performance which led to her being invited to sing it in 12 concerts on Maastricht&apos;s Vrijthof Square, ie, as you reacted to. Note, it was mentioned in the reaction that she had the courage to sing in front of &quot;a couple of thousand&quot; people; there were in fact 12,500 people on the square for each one of the concerts in July 2023 so in total 150,000 people saw Emma sing Voila. &nbsp;After her first performance which you have seen, Andre Rieu asked her to join his orchestra on tour. Emma and her parents of course agreed and she and her mother (occasionally her father) spent 2.5 years travelling across the world, 188 concerts and 2.5 million people. A year after the Voila performance, Emma returned to the Vrijthof again and performed &apos;Dancing On The Stars&apos;, a song dedicated to, and which she had presented to, her recent mentor, Andre Rieu.<br>During her time on tour, at age 16, Emma decided she wanted to put on her own landmark concert. She herself phoned up the management of Amsterdam&apos;s prestigious Royal Concertgebouw, in the top 3 or 4 concert halls in the world. Rachmaninoff and Mahler have played there as has Ella Fitzgerald and other huge names. However, in its 138 year history, Emma is the youngest artist to have their own concert there, and yet when she announced it a year in advance it sold out within 3 hours. With only three weeks to go to the concert, The Concertgebouw contacted her to say that an unexpected change meant that she could have the great hall for a second night, the day after her announced concert. Emma&apos;s parents panicked when Emma said yes, but she sold that out too. I was there at both concerts.<br>She commissioned the high profile New Symphonics Orchestra to support her, a choir, dancers and two elite guest artists. She chose a set list including some of her own original songs to tell her life story so far, and in final rehearsals she directed the artistic details herself. The concert was recorded for the national TV broadcaster NPO and when shown recently it had more than 1 million viewers (NL population is around 17 million). Here are a few of the performances I mentioned which you may wish to take a look at:<br>- 12 year old Emma Kok singing Opportunity (this video is the whole concert but the link takes you to the introduction of her performance): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBLloP4bQLE&amp;t=3451">https://youtu.be/LBLloP4bQLE?t=3451</a><br>- 16 Year Old Emma Kok singing Dancing On The Stars: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll1uR_HUOP8">https://youtu.be/Ll1uR_HUOP8?si=xbR3GDGljL81bYxs</a><br>- 17 Year Old Emma Kok at the Concertgebouw:<br>&apos;She Used To Be Mine&apos;: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALfJawPF824">https://youtu.be/ALfJawPF824?si=vkhZN1TnxZY0C3KE</a><br>&apos;Imagine&apos; (with her brother Enzo accompanying her): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn0ImwVIkig">https://youtu.be/mn0ImwVIkig?si=4nXdUYI7VUb8-uQY</a><br>&apos;Jade&apos; (a trubute to her best friend Jade Cops, terminally ill with cancer and in the audience with her family): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGp-C5YA_s4">https://youtu.be/ZGp-C5YA_s4?si=S8PY6vZmfmijYG_L</a><br>&apos;Tattoo / Euphoria&apos;: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZniIBt8vbA">https://youtu.be/wZniIBt8vbA?si=SpHlgjlWx-sBqfv8</a>

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• HA

  @hawkins1066 · 4 months ago

  3 years on from this performance, Emma, now 18, is rockin her own theater show on tour through her native Netherlands. Check out performances from her sold-out Rijks Concertgebouw (Royal Concert Hall) concerts in Amsterdam last year on YouTube. She&apos;s the face of a new generation of serious young female vocalists.

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