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The Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, was among the first period-instrument orchestras founded in the former East Germany, and it remains a leader in the field today. The group has specialized in the music of Bach and other composers of the German Baroque but has also performed and recorded Italian and French music, both instrumental and operatic.

The Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin ("Berlin Academy of Early Music") arose in 1982 in what was then East Berlin. Its members were young players from Berlin and Leipzig who had become interested in the burgeoning historical performance scene in the West and sought to emulate it by experimenting with old instruments. After a prolonged rehearsal period, the group made its debut in 1984 at Berlin's Schauspielhaus theater. Organized as a cooperative, it stood partially outside East Germany's cumbersome state musical bureaucracy, and it soon found bookings beyond Berlin at such events as the Handel Festival in the city of Halle. The following year, the group made its recording debut with an album of music by Telemann, Geminiani, and Blavet; it was released simultaneously on the East German state label Eterna and on West Germany's Capriccio label. After German reunification, the group's fame became international, and its performances and recordings were marked by collaborations with such international stars as keyboardist Ton Koopman, soprano Cecilia Bartoli, and conductor René Jacobs. The group has appeared on tour at Carnegie Hall in New York, and the orchestra earned a Grammy Award in 2002 when it backed Bartoli on an album of arias by Christoph Willibald Gluck. At home, the orchestra, often using the acronym Akamus, is a major part of Berlin's cultural life, presenting some 100 concerts a year. The group varies in size but has a core membership of about 30 players.

Another by-product of German reunification was a rapid expansion in the orchestra's recording career. The Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, recorded for Berlin Classics and Capriccio in the early '90s and was then signed to the Harmonia Mundi label in 1994, releasing a recording of Bach's secular cantatas relating the story of Phoebus und Pan, with Jacobs as conductor, in 1996. That recording, like several others by the group, was made with Berlin's RIAS Kammerchor. In 2014, the Akademie established its own concert series at the Prinztheater in Munich. The orchestra has recorded more than 50 albums for Harmonia Mundi, including a set of Bach violin concertos with violinist Isabelle Faust in 2019. The Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, marked its 40th year in 2022 with a flurry of activity that included performances of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in several German cities, Telemann's rare opera Pimpinone in Magdeburg, and tours with violist Antoine Tamestit and Jacobs. That year, the Akademie planned to release an all-Telemann album with Tamestit; a new recording of Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232, with Jacobs; a recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 4, Op. 60, and Symphony No. 8, Op. 93; and an 11-disc set, compiling the group's best recordings of the Bach family over its long career. ~ James Manheim

The Baroque oboist Xenia Löffler has been prominent among German historical-instrument players as a soloist, as principal oboist of the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin, and as leader of her own Amphion Wind Octet. She is also an important educator.

Löffler was born in Erlangen, in the German state of Bavaria, in 1972. Her love of Baroque oboe began in 1990, when she played one of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach recordings on a new stereo she had just bought -- her first. She enrolled at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, a major center for the study of early music, and also studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in the Netherlands. In 1998, Löffler and some of her classmates from Basel formed the Amphion Wind Octet, who have recorded nine albums and appeared at various European festivals. A breakthrough came in 2000 when Löffler joined the touring version of Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists, performing on his Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, which featured renditions of Bach cantatas in places associated with their origins. The following year, she joined the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin, one of Germany's top Baroque orchestras, rising to the position of principal oboist. She has performed as an oboe soloist with ensembles including the Batzdorfer Hofkapelle, Prague's Collegium 1704, and the Händel-Festspielorchester in Halle. Löffler has taught since 2004 at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany, and often gives master classes in Germany and beyond.

Her recording career has focused on neglected repertory for the Baroque oboe, including a 2014 release on Accent that featured music by the brother pair of Johann Gottlieb Graun and Carl Heinrich Graun. She released an album of Bach oboe concertos on Accent in 2018, and the following year she was featured on a Harmonia Mundi release of Bach's music by violinist Isabelle Faust. ~ James Manheim

German violinist Bernhard Forck has been an important figure in Berlin's early music scene since the early 1980s. He has also played contemporary music in chamber groups.

Forck was born in Altdöbern, in the former East Germany, in 1963. He started violin lessons at age five and soon settled on the violin as a career choice. Forck entered the Musikhochschule Berlin (now the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler) in East Berlin, studying with Eberhard Feltz. At the university he encountered the Baroque violin, not at the time common in Communist-ruled countries, and other historical violins. Immediately fascinated, he took courses with Baroque players and conductors including Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Ingrid Seifert. In 1984, even before his 1986 graduation, he joined the new Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (founded in 1982), and rose through the ranks to become the group's concertmaster. Forck has been a key contributor to the group's sound over the years, conducting research into historical performance practices relevant to the music performed. He has performed with the Akademie not only across Europe and the Americas, but in Japan, the Middle East, and southeast Asia and Australia as it became, thanks in part to his work, one of continental Europe's most popular early music groups. He has also played with the Barocksolisten Berlin (Berlin Baroque Soloists).

Forck has also been active as a player of the modern violin. From 1986 to 1991, he was a member of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra (now the Konzerthausorchester), and in 1994 he founded the Manon Quartett Berlin, which has been devoted to the performance of contemporary music, specifically that of the Second Viennese School. The group spent a season as quartet-in-residence at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts.

In later life, Forck has devoted more of his energies to conducting. In 2007, he became music director of the Handel Festival Orchestra in Halle, Germany, and he has conducted the orchestra in productions of Handel's operas Alcina and Orlando there. In 2019, Forck joined German violinist Isabelle Faust and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin in recordings of multiple-violin concertos of Bach, released on the Harmonia Mundi label. ~ James Manheim