NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT

The Austrian-born conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has been voyaging through the musical centuries since the early 1950s and has introduced audiences to dazzling Early Music never encountered before, righted numerous musicological wrongs and has, latterly, brought a huge catalogue of insights to the symphonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Dvo?ák. A post-war pioneer of period-instrument performance, he still regularly conducts the Vienna Concentus Musicus, which he founded with his wife in the early 1950s, but now spends most of his time with modern symphony orchestras.

This profile of one of the leading conductors of our day focuses on his work with orchestras that have featured prominently in his career: Concentus Musicus, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The repertoire ranges from Haydn to Johann Strauss. Harnoncourt is seen in rehearsals for a Jürgen Flimm production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni for the Zürich Opera, and archive clips look back at the triumphant Monteverdi Cycle he mounted there with Jean-Pierre Ponelle, which launched the renaissance of the composer’s operas.

The conductor talks in interview about his life and his approach to music, and contributors include Thomas Hampson and Cecilia Bartoli.