concentus

By then, however, the period-instrument revolution was in full flow; when Paul Hindemith presented a scholarly “attempt to reconstruct the premiere” in Vienna in 1954, Harnoncourt and other members of his recently formed Concentus Musicus Wien played in the ensemble.

Harnoncourt had founded the pioneering period-instrument Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953.

He did so in 1968, devoting himself instead to his small period band, the Vienna Concentus Musicus, which he founded in 1953 with his new wife, Alice Harnoncourt, as concertmaster.

The discovery led to his obsession with period instruments, which he collected, and the founding of the Concentus.

Mr. Harnoncourt and the Concentus first drew wide attention among record collectors with their performances of Bach: most notably, from 1971 to 1990, the 200-plus surviving sacred cantatas for Teldec, a project shared with Gustav Leonhardt and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra.