Early Music Summer School

The Amsterdam Early Music Summer School is an Early Music course targeting the historically informed performance of Baroque and Classical music. The course is open to participants of all ages (instrumentalists as well as vocalists) and will include private lessons from expert teachers from the Early Music Faculty at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, as well as workshops, masterclasses, lectures, concerts, and lots of chances to play with fellow students from all over the world.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Early Music revival might never have taken place had it not been for the music of J.S. Bach. Many scholars date the beginning of the movement to the 1829 performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion conducted by Felix Mendelssohn while the success of the Bach Gesellschaft publication of the complete works of Bach, begun in 1850 (in the Bach-Gesellschaft-Ausgabe) stimulated others to publish complete editions of composers like Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau and Ockeghem. Even as late as the 1940s, it was performances of the Matthew Passion that inspired the most influential 20th-century exponent of Early Music, Gustav Leonhardt, to perform pieces composed before 1800: Leonhardt even went so far as to say that he might never have become a musician at all if, as a young boy, he had heard Handel’s music instead of Bach’s.

The Early Music Summer School of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam will focus on German music from Praetorius to J. S. Bach, examining the roots of the style that would inspire the Early Music movement itself. Students will participate in master classes, dance workshops, lectures and concerts centered around the German style and performance practice.

Xenia Meijer, Maarten Koningsberger voice
Rachel Davies-Farr baroque dance 
Alfredo Bernardini baroque oboe
Jed Wentz traverso
Eric Bosgraaf recorder
Lidewij van der Voort baroque violin
Wieland Kuijken viola da gamba
Maggie Urquhart violone
Job ter Haar baroque cello
Benny Aghassi baroque bassoon
Jacques van Oortmerssen organ
Richard Egarr harpsichord
Fred Jacobs lute/theorbo
Thérèse de Goede basso continuo
Gerard van Vuuren accompaniment

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