The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century (Dutch: Orkest van de Achttiende Eeuw) is a Dutch early music orchestra. Frans Brüggen and Sieuwert Verster co-founded the orchestra in 1981.
The orchestra consists of about 60 members from many different countries, who all play on period instruments. The group was formed as a collective, so all orchestra members and the conductor receive equal shares of concert earnings. The orchestra does not audition its members, but receives them through word-of-mouth invitations.
The orchestra has toured widely both in Europe and America and recorded extensively with Philips Classics, including symphonies of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart
Famous quotes containing the words eighteenth century, orchestra and/or eighteenth:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“As the artist
extends his world with
one gratuitous flourish—a stroke of white or
a run on the clarinet above the
bass tones of the orchestra ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“F.R. Leavis’s “eat up your broccoli” approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)