Philippe Herreweghe

Philippe Herreweghe (born 2 May 1947, Ghent) is a Belgian conductor. In his school years at the University of Ghent, Herreweghe combined studies in medical science and psychiatry with a musical education at the Ghent Conservatory, where Marcel Gazelle, Yehudi Menuhin's accompanist, was his piano teacher. In the same period, he began conducting and in 1970 founded the Collegium Vocale Ghent, and gave up medicine. Very soon Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt took notice of his musical approach, and invited him and the "Collegium Vocale Gent" to join them in their recordings of the complete Bach cantatas. Herreweghe's approach to baroque music came to be widely recognised, and in 1977 he founded another ensemble in Paris, La Chapelle Royale, to perform the music of the French Golden Age. Since then he has started several other groups and ensembles with whom he managed to create a repertoire stretching from the Renaissance to contemporary music: the Ensemble Vocale Européen, specialised in Renaissance polyphony, and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, founded in 1991 to bring alive, once again, the repertoire of the romantic and pre-romantic era on original instruments.

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