Christopher Hogwood - Biography

Biography

Hogwood studied music and classical literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He went on to study performance and conducting under Raymond Leppard and Thurston Dart; and later with Rafael Puyana and Gustav Leonhardt. He also studied in Prague with Zuzana Ruzickova for a year, under a British Council scholarship.

In 1967, Hogwood founded the Early Music Consort with David Munrow, and in 1973 he founded the Academy of Ancient Music, specializing in performances of baroque and early classical music with period instruments. The Early Music Consort was disbanded following Munrow's death in 1976, but Hogwood continued to perform and record with the Academy of Ancient Music.

Since 1981, Hogwood has conducted regularly in the United States. He served as Artistic Director of Boston's Handel and Haydn Society from 1986 to 2001, and since then has held the title of Conductor Laureate. From 1983 to 1985 Hogwood was artistic director of the Mostly Mozart Festival in the Barbican Centre in London. From 1988 to 1992, he was musical director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota.

Hogwood has conducted a considerable amount of opera. He made his operatic debut in 1983, conducting Don Giovanni in St. Louis, Missouri. He has worked with Berlin State Opera; La Scala, Milan; Royal Opera Stockholm; the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Chorégies d'Orange and Houston Grand Opera. With Opera Australia, he performed Idomeneo in 1994 and La Clemenza di Tito in 1997. In 2009, he returned to the Royal Opera House to conduct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and Handel's Acis and Galatea. 2009 also saw him conducting Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Teatro Real in Madrid, in a production directed by Robert Lepage. In late 2010 and early 2011, he conducted a series of performances of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro at Zurich Opera House.

On 1 September 2006, harpsichordist Richard Egarr succeeded Hogwood as Music Director of the Academy of Ancient Music and Hogwood assumed the title of Emeritus Director. Hogwood said he expected to conduct 'at least one major project' with the Academy each year. He conducted them in a series of concert performances of Handel operas which began in 2007 with Amadigi. 2008 saw performances of Flavio, and the series concluded in May 2009, the Handel anniversary, with Arianna in Creta. In 2013 he is due to conduct the Academy in Imeneo.

Although Hogwood is best known for the baroque and early classical repertoire, he also performs contemporary music, with a particular affinity for the neo-baroque and neoclassical schools including many works by Stravinsky, Martinů and Hindemith.

He has made numerous solo recordings on harpsichord (Louis Couperin, J. S. Bach, Thomas Arne, William Byrd's My Lady Nevells Booke) and done much to promote the clavichord in the Secret Bach/Handel/Mozart series of recordings, which puts in its historical context the most common domestic instrument of that epoch. He owns an important collection of historical keyboard instruments.

Since 1992 Hogwood has been international professor of Early Music Performance in the Royal Academy of Music. He is an Honorary Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge and visiting professor at King's College London. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1989 he was appointed a Commander of the British Empire. In July 2010, Hogwood was appointed Professor of Music at Gresham College, London. Hogwood serves as a member of Lowell House's Senior Common Room at Harvard University.

He was the recipient of the Halle Handel Prize in 2008.