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, eighteenth and/or century:
“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)
““Pop” Wyman ruled here with a firm but gentle hand; no drunken man was ever served at the bar; no married man was allowed to play at the tables; across the face of the large clock was written “Please Don’t Swear,” and over the orchestra appeared the gentle admonition, “Don’t Shoot the Pianist—He’s Doing His Damndest.””
—Administration in the State of Colo, U.S. public relief program. Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State (The WPA Guide to Colorado)
“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)
“When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish.”
—Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.)