Alan Curtis (harpsichordist)

Alan Curtis ( born November 17, 1934 in Mason, Michigan) is an American harpsichordist, musicologist and conductor of baroque operas.

Life

Alan Curtis studied 1957 to 1959 in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt, with whom he performed several Bach concertos for harpsichords. At the University of Illinois, he earned his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the organ music of Sweelinck. While still a student, he was regarded as the first modern harpsichordist who could represent the works of Louis Couperin and the operas by composers such as Monteverdi and Rameau adequately with historical instruments. Plates, which he brought out in the 1960s and 1970s, contain solo piano music of Rameau and Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1978, he designed the successful attempt in a production of Handel's opera Alceste Handel's operas the orchestra to revive, including the use of theorbo, the chitarrone and the chromatic harpsichord. Subsequently, he worked several times as a conductor at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music.

Curtis is the director of the company founded by him in 1979 Il Complesso Barocco Baroque Orchestra.