The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs 2010, an important Dutch award in the field of culture, has gone to the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.

Frans Brüggen (Conductor) and Sieuwert Verster (Director) co-founded the orchestra in Amsterdam in 1981. It consists of about 60 members from many different countries, who all play on period instruments or on contemporary copies thereof. All orchestra members and the conductor receive equal shares of concert earnings. The orchestra does not audition its members, but receives them through word-of-mouth invitations.

Until now, the orchestra went on tour about a hundred times, performing for more than a million spectators, during more than a thousand concerts all over the world. The wide-ranging repertoire this orchestra has recorded for Philips Classics includes works by Purcell, Bach, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert & Mendelssohn. Many of their recordings have received international awards.

More about Frans Brüggen

Frans Brüggen was born in Amsterdam in 1934. After finishing his studies he launched a major career as a virtuoso performer of music for the recorder. As a flute soloist, he was equally at home in performances of the Baroque masters and contemporary avant-garde composers. He also gave informative lectures and illustrative performances of recorder music in Europe.

At the age of 21, he was appointed professor at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and later held positions as Erasmus Professor at Harvard University and Regent's Professor at the University of Berkeley, making him one of the youngest musical scholars of the time though still remaining, as Luciano Berio wrote, "a musician who is not an archeologist but a great artist”.

You can see and hear the orchestra on YouTube, performing Midsummer Night's Dream from Mendelssohn on August 28 2009 in Utrecht, together with the Nederlands Kamerkoor and Dutch video artist Daniëlle Kwaaitaal.