Orpheus Instituut acquires the library of Ton Koopman
- Author(s)Bruno Forment and Huub Van Der Linden
- Publication year2021
- SeriesWeb publications
- Codehttps://doi.org/10.1017/S1478570620000391
- Price€29,68
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Published online by Cambridge University Press
Around the age of thirteen, Ton Koopman not only discovered the harpsychord, he also picked up his first (old' book at a shop in his native city of Zwolle. Allured by the sight, touch and smell of a nineteenth-century edition of Molière's works, he purchased the volume and thus embarked upon a lifelong quest for old prints and manuscripts...
Since that day, Koopman has collected nearly twenty thousand volumes. The fruits of this passion (or addiction, some would say- were recently acquired by the Orpheus Instituut in Ghent with the support of the Désiré Collen Foundation, the Flemish Authorities and the City of Ghent. This report offers a glimpse into the Koopman collection and the plans that are unfolding in connection with it.
Ton Koopman is globally acclaimed as an organist, harpsichordist and conductor. His period-instrument performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, both as a soloist and with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, can be heard on well over two hundred discs, including complete recordings of Butehude's works and J. S. Bach's cantatas. Koopman has furthermore built up a reputation as music pedagogue and professor at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag and the Universiteit Leiden. As far back as 1985 he offered a survey of baroque performance practice in a book entitled Barokmuziek: Theorie en praktijk (Baroque Music: Theory and Practice).
