About Frans Brüggen

Once the world’s most famous recorder player, today Frans Brüggen is considered among the foremost experts in the performance of eighteenth century music. He was born in Amsterdam and studied musicology at its university. At 21, he was appointed professor at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and later held a position as Erasmus professor at Harvard University and Regents professor at the University of Berkeley.

As Luciano Berio wrote, he is “a musician who is not an archeologist but a great artist”. In 1981 he founded the orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, which consists of some sixty members from 19 different countries. Three times a year the orchestra assembles to go on tour. The musicians, who are all specialists in eighteenth and nineteenth century music, play on period instruments, or on contemporary copies.

Frans Brüggen appears regularly as a guest conductor with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Orchestre de Paris, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and others. After nearly 50 CDs on Philips, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century records exclusively for Glossa since 1997, in co-production with their own production house, The Grand Tour.