The conductor, scholar, and keyboard player Christopher Hogwood’s death robs the musical world of one its finest and most refined consciences. Hogwood’s exemplary recordings and performances of baroque and classical repertoire with the ensemble that he founded over 40 years ago, the Academy of Ancient Music (including still-pioneering surveys of the complete symphonies of Mozart and 77 symphonies of a planned complete symphony series of Haydn), and of 20th century music - above all Martinů- with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Kammerorchester Basel, will remain cornerstones of recording history. Hogwood explored this repertoire - and much, much more - with the solid historical foundations of period instrument practice and above all, a spirit of restless and questing aesthetic and intellectual enquiry.
Hogwood’s scholarship, symbiotically related to his performances, is just as important as his music-making, and he leaves an outstanding legacy of books, articles, and lectures that are required reading and listening for anyone interested in Handel, Haydn, or the wider story of how music relates to social and cultural contexts from the baroque to the 21st century. To talk to Hogwood was to encounter a mind and personality of inspirational perspicacity, intellectual clarity, and delicately mischievous wit. As well as just a fraction of the recordings he leaves us, here are links to Hogwood’s fabulously enlightening Gresham College lectures that he gave late last year and early this year, a record of a man at the top of his creative and scholarly form, and a reminder of the huge loss he is for the whole of the musical world.
Here’s five of my favourite recordings of his.
