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Musica Amphion is a popular chamber ensemble devoted to the performance of 17th and 18th century music on period instruments. A look at its discography and concert repertory divulges strong loyalty to its stated aim: the names J.S. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Sweelinck, Corelli, Purcell, and Mozart prominently figure in the repertory, but lesser known, and often rarely encountered Baroque and early Classical composers are given attention, as well, including Peter Cornet, Herman Hollanders, Cornelis Padbrué, Cornelis Schuyt, and Nicolas Vallet. The ensemble has made many recordings, most available on the Brilliant Classics label.

Musica Amphion was formed in 1993 by harpsichordist and recorder player Pieter-Jan Belder, who typically conducts the ensemble from the keyboard during performance. The name of the group derives from Greek mythology: Amphion, the son of Zeus and Antiope, was a great singer and player of the lyre. There are about eight core musicians in Musica Amphion, though the number can expand or contract depending on the work played. Rémy Baudet is the group's concertmaster and serves in that capacity in the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under famed conductor Frans Brüggen.

Like Baudet, the other members of Musica Amphion play in one or more other prominent orchestras, such as the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, Les Musiciens du Louvre, and several more. The individual players also regularly appear in concert in chamber groups and in solo roles.

Following its formation, Musica Amphion gave regular concerts, mostly in Amsterdam, particularly in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, but also at the Bach Festival. In addition, it has appeared throughout Holland, notably at the Festival Classique in The Hague and the Early Music Festival Utrecht. Musica Amphion's first recordings began to appear in the early years of the new century. Among the more ambitious projects was a 10-CD set of the complete works of Corelli, issued on Brilliant Classics in 2005. Other ambitious recording projects would follow, including a seven-disc set of the complete chamber music of Henry Purcell, also on Brilliant Classics, issued in 2008.

In the 2009-2010 season Musica Amphion served as the ensemble-in-residence at the Arnhem Musis Sacrum (concert hall). That season also involved much concert activity for the group throughout Holland and in France, with an appearance in Paris in April. Among Musica Amphion's later recordings is the 2009 Brilliant Classics CD of selections from Telemann's Tafelmusik.

Multi-instrumentalist Pieter-Jan Belder conducts his Musica Amphion ensemble from the keyboard. He is also active as a soloist, playing harpsichord, fortepiano, organ, clavichord, and recorder.

Belder was born on January 19, 1966, in Capelle aan den IJssel in the southern Netherlands. From the start, he pursued several instruments, studying recording at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague with Ricardo Kanji and harpsichord with Bob van Asperen at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. He graduated from both institutions in 1990. Belder founded the chamber group Musica Amphion in 1993 and since then has divided his time between that group, his solo career, and teaching at the Sweelinck Conservatory, whose faculty he joined in 1990. In 1994, he made his recording debut, appearing on recorder under Kanjii's baton on the album Georg Philipp Telemann: Baroque Orchestra Concerto '91. Belder won prizes at the NDR Harpsichord Competition in Hamburg in 1997, and the Leipzig Bach Harpsichord Competition in 2000, and those wins helped open up performing opportunities; soon, he was appearing as a continuo player with such groups as the Nederlandse Bachvereniging, the Collegium Vocale Gent, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

Belder has been in demand at summer events such as the Leipzig Bach Festival and the Festival de Música Antiga in Barcelona. He has appeared frequently on television and radio broadcasts in Germany and the Netherlands. Belder is perhaps most familiar through his participation, both as a soloist and with Musica Amphion, in large collections issued by the budget label Brilliant in the Netherlands. He recorded the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a group of more than 300 pieces, for Brilliant between 2010 and 2013, and also issued multiple-disc series devoted to Bach, Domenico Scarlatti (all 555 keyboard sonatas), Antonio Soler, and more. With Musica Amphion, he released a complete recording of Telemann's large Tafelmusik chamber music collection. In 2019, he recorded Bach's The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, for Brilliant. In 2023, he issued a recording of William Byrd's My Lady Nevells Booke on that label; by that time, his recording catalog included well over 200 items. ~ James Manheim

Thomas Zehetmair has fashioned a highly successful and broadly eclectic career. He is a virtuoso violinist of international repute, a chamber player who has founded a critically acclaimed quartet, a conductor of front-rank status, and a musician whose repertory in any role reaches from Baroque-era fare to the contemporary. As of the mid-2020s, Zehetmair held the conductorships of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National d'Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. He also holds the title of conductor laureate of the Royal Northern Sinfonia.

Zehetmair was born in Salzburg, Austria, on November 23, 1961. He began violin lessons at five with his parents, both talented violinists. His advanced studies were at the Salzburg Mozarteum under his father, Helmut. He took further instruction on the violin from Nathan Milstein and Max Rostal. Zehetmair made his recording debut in the late '70s with a recording of music by Mozart and worked busily at establishing an international reputation throughout the '80s, and, by 1990, he regularly appeared to acclaim at major concert venues from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. In 1993, he took on his first conducting post when he became co-director of the Camerata Bern. The following year, he founded the Zehetmair Quartet, consequently dividing his time among solo performances, chamber concerts, and conducting.

His repertoire spans from Baroque-era fare, particularly Bach, up through Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and extending to Bartók, Schoenberg, and Berg, as well as to contemporary composers such as Heinz Holliger, Valentin Silvestrov, and Wilhelm Killmayer. In the concertos of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and other pre-modern composers, Zehetmair often provides his own cadenzas, and in these works and those of Bach, he frequently appears as soloist while conducting the orchestra. He employs historic performance practices in early works, having studied such details with Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In the chamber realm, he has collaborated with world-class musicians, including pianists Alfred Brendel and Cyprien Katsaris and violinist Gidon Kremer. As a soloist, Zehetmair has appeared with leading orchestras across the globe, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony (Tokyo), and the Boston Symphony, among many others.

Zehetmair was the music director of the Northern Sinfonia from 2002 to 2014 (renamed the Royal Northern Sinfonia in 2013), after which he was named conductor laureate. He was the music director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris from 2012 to 2014. From 2016 to 2021, he was the principal conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur. Zehetmair took up the post of chief conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 2019, followed shortly by an appointment as the principal conductor of the Orchestre National d'Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, beginning in 2021. The following year, he was named the principal conductor and artistic director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Zehetmair has made numerous recordings spread over a variety of labels, including EMI, Philips, and Warner Classics. In 2019, he issued an album of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas for violin on ECM New Series and led the Musikkollegium Winterthur on a recording of Brahms' Symphonies. He returned to ECM New Series in 2023 with violist Ruth Killius and the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a recording of music by Bartók, Beethoven, and John Casken. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke

Even though he spent much of his career behind the Iron Curtain in Communist East Germany, conductor Kurt Masur was one of the most respected conductors of the 20th century and was recognized internationally. The longtime conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, he conducted the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic in later life and was acclaimed for his work with both. Masur's recording catalog is vast, and his performances began to appear in the West even before German reunification. His recordings continued to appear in reissues well after his death; a 1971 recording of Mendelssohn's 12 Jugendsinfonien was issued by the Berlin Classics label in 2023.

Masur was born on July 18, 1927, in Brieg in the German province of Lower Silesia (now Brzeg, Poland). Masur's father was an electrical engineer, and Masur completed an engineer's apprenticeship and went to work for his father. However, he also loved music and took piano lessons as a teen from Katharina Hartmann, and studied piano and cello at the University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław, Poland). Masur was active as a paratrooper with the German army during World War II, and of his 150-man unit, only 27 survived. After the war, he enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in Leipzig, remaining there for several years but dropping out at 21 when he got a job as a répétiteur (rehearsal coach) at what is now the Halle Opera House. Masur's rise through the conducting ranks in the 1950s followed the old Kapellmeister model at first; he held that position with the Stadttheater Erfurt from 1951 to 1953 and then the same post with the Leipzig Opera Theater from 1953 to 1955. In 1955, he became the conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic; he returned to operatic posts at the State Theater of Mecklenburg and then the Komische Oper Berlin before returning to the Dresden Philharmonic from 1967 to 1972.

In 1970, Masur assumed the position for which he would become best known, that of Gewandhauskapellmeister of Leipzig, or conductor and artistic director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig. This was the most prestigious ensemble in the former East Germany, with a long history dating back to its founder and first conductor, Felix Mendelssohn. Masur remained the orchestra's conductor until 1991, making many recordings with the group; an early one, issued in 1974, featured Mendelssohn's cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60. Some of Masur's albums were issued only in the Communist world, but as his popularity grew, he was allowed to perform in the West, and his albums were sold there. He conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in 1974 and took the Gewandhaus Orchestra on a U.S. tour that year. In 1981, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. In the last days of East Germany's Communist regime, Masur was widely noted for his activities in support of human rights.

In 1991, he was named music director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding the modernist Pierre Boulez and the experimentally oriented Zubin Mehta. Masur, with a focus on middle-of-the-road German and Russian repertory, was credited with sharpening the orchestra's sound over his 11 years at the helm. In 1991 alone, he released ten albums, many of them on the Teldec label; some featured the Gewandhaus Orchestra and others the New York Philharmonic. Masur held positions as music director of the London Philharmonic from 2000 to 2007 and of the Orchestre National de France from 2002 to 2008. He maintained a busy schedule of guest appearances but revealed in 2012 that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Masur died on December 19, 2015, in Greenwich, Connecticut. His recording catalog, with Beethoven the most common composer but also including such novelties as a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, numbered some 300 releases; by the mid-2020s, the flow of reissues of his music had hardly slowed. Masur was honored with a "Google Doodle" on the anniversary of his birth in 2018. ~ James Manheim

Dutch recorder player Erik Bosgraaf is widely considered one of the world's top players of his instrument; still less debatable is that his attitude toward recorder repertoire, ranging far beyond typical Renaissance and Baroque works, is unusually adventurous.

Bosgraaf was born in Drachten, the Netherlands, on May 9, 1980. He combined recorder studies at the Amsterdam Conservatory with musicology, earning an M.A. from the University of Utrecht in 2006 and the following year releasing a three-CD box set of music by Jacob van Eyck. When this album found unexpected commercial success, Bosgraaf began to devote full time to his recorder career. He made an international tour in 2011-2012 under the auspices of the European Concert Hall Organization's Rising Stars program.

Bosgraaf has made orchestral appearances not only with top Dutch orchestras but with the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He is the dedicatee of more than 100 commissioned works, 12 of which are concertos. These include a recorder concerto inspired by Mahler by Dutch composer Willem Jeths. Bosgraaf's interests have extended beyond contemporary concert music to jazz, electronics, and collaborations with filmmakers, and he has participated in a multimedia realization of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by Dutch filmmakers Paul and Menno de Nooijer. Bosgraaf performed on the soundtrack of the Werner Herzog film Salt and Fire.

Most of Bosgraaf's concerto and group recordings have been made with his Ensemble Cordevento, with which he has also appeared live. The group appears in various guises, depending on the repertoire. The name means "strings and winds" in Italian, and the membership is flexibly deployed in ensembles ranging from a trio to a full Baroque orchestra, playing on historically authentic instruments. The ensemble has performed in Berlin, Utrecht, Barcelona, Modena, Moscow, Madrid, Saint Petersburg, Sofia, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Bosgraaf is a 2011 recipient of the Nederlandse Muziekprijs (Netherlands Music Prize), the country's foremost musical honor. ~ James Manheim