
It's 1986. For some ten years there has existed a largely London-based core of players of baroque instruments who have played for bands run autonomously by experts. Confidence and standards have improved greatly. Music-making has been transformed.
And then a group of players forms a self-governing orchestra of period instruments - the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE). There's no single conductor. Instead, conductors or directors from violin or keyboard are appointed on a concert-by-concert basis. The OAE is quickly recognised as special, and the recording industry clasps it to its bosom.
Nearly twenty years later the OAE, now Associate Orchestra at London's South Bank Centre and at Glyndebourne, flourishes. Two great men, Frans Bruggen and Sir Simon Rattle, are Principal Guest Conductors. Alison Bury, Margaret Faultless and Catherine Mackintosh, share the leader's desk. And the OAE continues to thrill through its dynamic, refined, extraordinary playing. |