René Jacobs

Following the path of least resistance has never appealed to René Jacobs. His uncompromising pursuit of truth and meaning in the performance of music from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries holds no place for the safe, the routine, or the expected. Born in Ghent in 1946, he cut his musical teeth as a chorister at the city’s medieval cathedral and developed invaluable skills for decoding ancient texts with university studies in classical philology. During the 1960s, he made his mark as a countertenor soloist with such postwar pioneers of the Early Music Movement as the professorial Gustav Leonhardt and Belgium’s Kuijken brothers, Sigiswald, Barthold, and Wieland. His vibrant, edgy voice and feeling for the sweeping expressive gestures of music from the period 1600 to 1750 found an ideal home in the recording studio, leading him to contribute to benchmark albums of core Baroque works and the modern revival of practically unknown compositions by, among others, Frescobaldi, Cesti, and Henri Dumont. In 1977, Jacobs formed Concerto Vocale, dedicated to the historically informed performance of Baroque music, singing with the group while simultaneously directing it in a series of revelatory recordings for Harmonia Mundi France. His often iconoclastic interpretations as a conductor combine a forensic attention to the sources with the courage to ditch modern performance conventions. Jacobs helped establish period-instrument orchestras as part of the mainstream of opera performance with regular appearances at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Berlin Staatsoper, and Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, and drew close attention to this important work during his time as artistic director of the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music (1996-2009). Jacobs’ best-selling recordings of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, and Don Giovanni, landmarks of a discography that comprises well over 250 albums, and revelatory accounts of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion delivered ear-opening insights into works that had been taken for granted for decades.