Philippe Herreweghe

Who is Philippe Herreweghe?

Philippe Herreweghe 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 Vocal Européen, which specialises in Renaissance polyphony, and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, founded in 1991 to revive the repertoire of the romantic and pre-romantic era on original instruments.