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By any reckoning, conductor Martin Pearlman has been a leading figure in the American early music movement, having established the influential Boston Baroque period instrument orchestra and chorus and led it since its beginnings as Banchetto Musicale in 1973. He has presented the American or Boston premieres of numerous Baroque works, and is also a noted composer, educator, harpsichordist, and scholar. Pearlman was born in Chicago on May 21, 1945. His college education at Cornell University included both composition and harpsichord performance, the latter unusual in an American institution at the time. Among his composition teachers was Karel Husa. Pearlman also studied violin and piano. He received a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Amsterdam for studies with Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, then returned to the U.S. and enrolled in the master's program in composition at Yale, studying composition with Yehudi Wyner, experimenting with electronic music, and continuing to study harpsichord with the top American player of the day, Ralph Kirkpatrick. In the early 1970s he concertized widely as a harpsichordist, winning the Erwin Bodky Competition in Boston and, notably, scoring a prize at the Festival of Flanders competition in Bruges, Belgium. Pearlman established Banchetto Musicale in the 1973-1974 season, naming it ("Musical Banquet") after a collection of works by German early Baroque composer Johann Hermann Schein; in 1992, the group was renamed Boston Baroque. That group has presented an annual series in Boston that has included the modern world premiere of the singspiel opera Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher's Stone), co-composed by Mozart, as well as new versions of Mozart's incomplete short comic opera Lo sposo deluso, K. 430, and Purcell's The Comic History of Don Quixote. He gave the Boston premieres of all three Monteverdi operas as well as of Rameau's Zoroastre. Pearlman has a long guest-conducting résumé that includes appearances with the Washington Opera, the Utah Opera, Opera Columbus, the San Antonio Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the New World Symphony; he is an enthusiastic conductor of both opera and instrumental music. With Banchetto Musicale and Boston Baroque he has made over 25 albums, many of them on the Telarc label; four of them earned Grammy award nominations, and to date, Pearlman is the only historical-performance-oriented conductor to appear on the Grammy telecast. He has also released several albums as a solo harpsichordist. In 2018, Boston Baroque, with Pearlman on keyboards and violinist Christina Day Martinson, became the first American group to record on Britain's Linn label, with a reading of Heinrich Ignaz von Biber's Mystery Sonatas. Pearlman has taught and directed Baroque ensembles at Boston University since 2002. He has made performing editions of works by Monteverdi and others. Pearlman's compositions include incidental music for three plays by Samuel Beckett, commissioned in 2006 for the centennial of the playwright's birth and performed at Harvard University and New York's 92nd Street Y. ~ James Manheim

When it was founded in 1973, Boston Baroque was the first major period-instrument orchestra in the U.S. specializing in Baroque music. By general consensus, it remains one of the best, with a long record of performances and recordings of novel and interesting repertory. Boston Baroque has been directed through its entire lifetime by conductor and harpsichordist Martin Pearlman, who has also unearthed new works and prepared them for performance. The group's original name was Banchetto Musicale, taken from a collection of instrumental dances by Johann Hermann Schein. At the time, period-instrument performances, especially of Baroque music, were rare in the U.S. and by no means dominant in Europe. In the 1980s, the group gave several major American premieres, including the first Boston performance of Handel's Messiah on period instruments in 1981 (an event that has become an important annual tradition in Boston), the first American performance of Rameau's opera Zoroastre, and American period-instrument premieres of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, and Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61. Messiah became Boston Baroque's first recording after signing with the Telarc label in 1992, an association that lasted until heavy staff cutbacks hit that label in the 2010s. Significant performances and recordings, many involving extensive research by Pearlman, included the modern-day world premiere of Der Stein der Weisen (1998), a collaborative comic German opera that included contributions by Mozart, a rare cycle of Monteverdi's three surviving operas, semi-staged, the world's first period-instrument performance of the completion of Mozart's Requiem, K. 626, by Robert Levin, and Lost Music of Early America, featuring music of North Carolina's Moravian communities. The orchestra's repertoire extends as far forward as Beethoven, many of whose short works they have been the first to perform on historical instruments, and Cherubini. In addition to regular series performances in Boston, the orchestra has toured across the U.S. and made two tours of Poland, in 2003 and 2015. Boston Baroque signed with Scotland's Linn label and released a recording of Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass in 2013. In 2018 they backed Baroque violinist Christina Day Martinson on a Linn recording of Heinrich Ignaz von Biber's Mystery Sonatas. Boston Baroque has been nominated for three Grammy awards, for recordings of Messiah, Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, and Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232. ~ James Manheim