Martin Pearlman

Conductor Martin Pearlman stands among the foremost contributors to America’s historically informed performance scene through his founding and ongoing leadership of the period-instrument orchestra and chorus first known as Banchetto Musicale and later renamed Boston Baroque. Since launching the ensemble in the 1973–1974 season, he has introduced numerous Baroque scores to American or Boston audiences for the first time while maintaining parallel careers as composer, educator, harpsichordist, and musicologist. Born in Chicago on May 21, 1945, Pearlman pursued undergraduate studies at Cornell University that combined composition—under Karel Husa—with harpsichord, an uncommon pairing at American universities then; he also trained on violin and piano. A Fulbright grant took him to Amsterdam for lessons with Gustav Leonhardt, after which he entered Yale’s master’s program in composition, working with Yehudi Wyner, exploring electronic music, and continuing harpsichord study with Ralph Kirkpatrick. Throughout the early 1970s he performed widely as a solo harpsichordist, earning the Erwin Bodky Competition prize in Boston and an award at the Festival of Flanders in Bruges. He chose the name Banchetto Musicale from a collection by Johann Hermann Schein; the organization became Boston Baroque in 1992. Its Boston subscription series has featured the modern world premiere of the singspiel Der Stein der Weisen, partly by Mozart, together with Pearlman’s new editions of Mozart’s unfinished Lo sposo deluso, K. 430, and Purcell’s The Comic History of Don Quixote. He has likewise led the city’s first hearings of Monteverdi’s three operas and of Rameau’s Zoroastre. Guest engagements have taken him to Washington Opera, Utah Opera, Opera Columbus, the San Antonio Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the New World Symphony, where he conducts both opera and symphonic repertoire with equal commitment. More than twenty-five recordings with Boston Baroque, most issued by Telarc, include four Grammy-nominated projects; he remains the sole conductor rooted in historical performance to appear on the Grammy broadcast. Separate solo harpsichord discs have also appeared. In 2018 Pearlman and violinist Christina Day Martinson led Boston Baroque onto Britain’s Linn label—the first American ensemble so honored—with a recording of Heinrich Ignaz von Biber’s Mystery Sonatas. Since 2002 he has taught and directed Baroque ensembles at Boston University and prepared performing editions of Monteverdi and other composers. His own works encompass incidental scores for three Samuel Beckett plays, commissioned in 2006 for the playwright’s centennial and presented at Harvard University and New York’s 92nd Street Y.