Nikolaus Harnoncourt announces retirement

[Seán]

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Early-Music Pioneer, Announces Retirement
By Michael Cooper
December 7, 2015

The great Austrian conductor and early-music pioneer Nikolaus Harnoncourt announced his retirement this weekend, as he celebrated his 86th birthday. Mr. Harnoncourt — who founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953, teamed up with Gustav Leonhardt to record nearly 200 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas for Teldec, and became a much-sought-after conductor of later music as well — announced his retirement in a handwritten note, copies of which were placed in the programs at a Concentus Musicus concert in Vienna. “Dear audience,” Mr. Harnoncourt wrote in the letter, which was in German. “My bodily strength requires me to cancel my future plans.”

He wrote of the “unbelievably deep relationship has developed between us on the stage and you in the hall,” added that “we have become a happy community of pioneers,” and urged audiences to remain faithful to that spirit.

Mr. Harnoncourt, who was born in Berlin to an aristocratic family and raised in Graz, Austria, began his career as a cellist. After founding the Concentus Musicus Wien with his wife, Alice, he delved into work with period instruments and Renaissance and Baroque performance traditions. During his long career, he led a famous cycle of Monteverdi operas; developed lasting relationships with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras; and played a wide variety of repertoire — including, at the age of 80, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.”

He was not afraid to be loquacious in rehearsals, he recalled in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. “When I sat in an orchestra, I always had this great question in my head, Why?” he said. “I think a musician has a right to get an answer to this question.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/ ... etirement/

[Jose Echenique]

We can´t possibly thank him enough.