Academy of Ancient Music

In 1973, the Academy of Ancient Music was revived by the British conductor and harpsichordist, Christopher Hogwood, for the purpose of playing 18th- and early 19th-century music on period instruments. For choral works, it is joined either by the Academy of Ancient Music Chorus or by a cathedral or collegiate choir with boys' voices.

The Academy of Ancient Music was the first orchestra to record all of Mozart's symphonies on period instruments. The Academy has since recorded the complete piano concertos and symphonies of Beethoven, and has recorded numerous Haydn symphonies and many of the Mozart piano concertos with fortepianist Robert Levin. The Academy has also recorded Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Handel's Orlando and Rinaldo, Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, Haydn's L'anima del filosofo and over 200 other recordings for a range of different labels.

The commissioning of new works under Paul Goodwin represented a new development for the orchestra. The first commission and recording, John Tavener's Eternity's Sunrise, met with enthusiastic critical acclaim and led to a second new Tavener work and recording, Total Eclipse. David Bedford's Like a Strand of Scarlet followed in 2001 and, in 2003, the AAM premiered John Woolrich's Arcangelo, written to mark the 350th anniversary of the birth of Arcangelo Corelli. The next commission in 2006 celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth with a work from the Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave, Journey into Light, which was written as a companion piece to Mozart's Exsultate, jubilate. Recently, this trend has been revived with commissioning the harpsichordist, conductor, and scholar Mahan Esfahani to write a new orchestration of Bach's The Art of Fugue, which was premiered at the BBC Proms in July 2012.

The orchestra regularly plays at prestigious venues and festivals in the United Kingdom and around the world, including London's Wigmore Hall, Barbican Arts Centre, the BBC Proms, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

The AAM is Orchestra-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge. Wikipedia