The Dutch recorder player and conductor Frans Brüggen paved the way for historical performance practice and also meant a lot for the development of recorder music.The Amsterdammer completed a conservatory study in flute and recorder in his own city and a study in musicology at the University of Amsterdam. As a 21-year-old young man, he was appointed in 1955 as a recorder teacher at the Royal
… Conservatory of The Hague. There he founded the department for historical performance practice in 1969. Together with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, Brüggen belonged to the first generation of musicians of the early music movement, who performed music on (exact copies of) instruments from the time in which that music was composed.As a young man he managed to shake off the image of the recorder as a children's instrument with his handsome appearance, casual attitude but above all virtuoso playing and stimulated contemporary composers to write works for this instrument. With harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and cellist Anner Bylsmabracht Brüggen albums with baroque music by Bach, Telemann, Handel and Corelli.In the 1970s, he increasingly shifted his attention to conducting. In 1981, together with musicologist Sieuwert Verster, he founded the Orchestra of the 18th century, which performed works from the Baroque and Classical periods in the most authentic way possible. With this orchestra, Brüggen recorded music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert, among others.In 2010 the orchestra was awarded the oeuvre prize of the Prince Bernhard Cultuurfonds and Brüggen himself was honored in 2012 when he received the Oeuvre Prize Edison Klassiek as a thank you for his enormous oeuvre and extraordinary services for Dutch music.more
