Dutch harpsichordist, organist, musicologist and conductor Ton Koopman has been a seminal figure of early music. At age 35 he established the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and a little over a decade later the Amsterdam Baroque Choir. The repertoire of the two ensembles focused on the oeuvre of Johann Sebastian Bach. The formation was soon recognized as one of the foremost ensembles of historically informed performance practice, and was regularly featured in the leading concert halls of Europe and other continents.
In 1994 he started a particularly ambitious enterprise to record all of Bach’s ecclesiastical and non-religious cantatas, and then went on to release the complete works of Dieterich Buxtehude, one of Bach’s most important forerunners. Koopman’s work as a performing artist and historian of music has been acknowledged with numerous honours, including the city of Leipzig’s Bach Award in 2006, and Lübeck’s Buxtehude Award in 2012. His recordings won the prizes of the most prestigious professional journals, and in 2017 he received the Edison Classical Award.