Philippe Herreweghe

Early life

Herreweghe received his first piano lessons from his mother.

In his school years at the University of Ghent, Herreweghe combined studies in medical science and psychiatry with a musical education at the Ghent Conservatory, where Marcel Gazelle, Yehudi Menuhin's accompanist, was his piano teacher.

Music career

In the same period, he began conducting and in 1969 he founded the Collegium Vocale Gent with a group of fellow students.

Very soon Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt took notice of his musical approach, and invited him and the Collegium Vocale Gent to join them in their recordings of the complete Bach cantatas.

Herreweghe’s energetic, authentic and rhetorical approach to baroque music was soon drawing praise and in 1977 he founded another ensemble in Paris, La Chapelle Royale, to perform the music of the French Golden Age. From 1982 to 2002 he was artistic director of the Académies Musicales de Saintes.

During this period, Herreweghe started several other groups and ensembles with whom he made historically appropriate and well-thought-out interpretations of repertoire stretching from the Renaissance to contemporary music.They include the Ensemble Vocal Européen, specialised in Renaissance polyphony, and the Orchestre des Champs Élysées, founded in 1991 with the aim of playing Romantic and pre-Romantic repertoire on original instruments.

Since 2009, Philippe Herreweghe and Collegium Vocale Gent have been actively working on the development of a large European-level symphonic choir, at the invitation of the prestigious Accademia Chigiana in Siena and from 2011 with the support of the European Union’s Cultural Programme.

For some time Herreweghe has been active performing the great symphonic works, from Beethoven to Gustav Mahler. Since 1997 he is principal conductor of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

As a guest conductor, Philippe Herreweghe has conducted a number of well-known orchestras, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Dutch Broadcasting Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic. Philippe Herreweghe was artistic director of the Festival of Saintes and was appointed permanent guest conductor of the Netherlands’ Radio Chamber Philharmonic since 2008. .

He is principally known as a conductor of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is regarded by leading Bach scholars today as a founding father of the baroque authentic practice, original-instrument movement and one of record label Harmonia Mundi's most prolific recording artists, with over sixty albums to his name.

Selected discography

Over the years, Philippe Herreweghe has built up an extensive discography of more than 100 recordings with all these different ensembles, on such labels as Harmonia Mundi France, Virgin Classics and Pentatone. Highlights include the Lagrime di San Pietro of Lassus, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Schumann, Mahler’s song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, Pierrot Lunaire by Schönberg, Weill's Violin Concerto, Berliner Requiem; Cantate vom Tod im Wald and the Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky. In 2010 he founded together with Outhere Music his own label φ (PHI), in order to give himself full artistic freedom to build up a rich and varied catalogue. Since then these recordings were published:

Recordings for PRIMEPHONIC

Awards

Philippe Herreweghe has received numerous European awards: