René Jacobs launched his professional life as a countertenor and swiftly established himself among the era’s most accomplished exponents of the voice. Over time he shifted his primary focus to the podium, and since the beginning of the twenty-first century he has appeared only infrequently as a singer. In his vocal years he brought renewed attention to a succession of neglected Baroque figures through his discs, among them Antonio Cesti, Sigismondo d’India, and Luca Marenzio, while continuing to perform canonical works by Monteverdi, J.S. Bach, and Handel in both concert and staged productions. On the rostrum he has directed numerous sacred scores by Bach and Buxtehude and has devoted particular energy to operas by Monteverdi, Handel, and Mozart; he has also programmed purely instrumental repertory, especially symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. In 2021 he led the Freiburger Barockorchester and Berlin RIAS Kammerkor in a new account of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
Jacobs entered the world in Ghent, Belgium, on 30 October 1946. As a boy he sang in the choir of St. Bavo’s Cathedral there. After completing a philology degree at Ghent University he trained with Louis Devos and Lucie Frateur, later attending master classes given by Alfred Deller. While already active on the concert platform, he made his first operatic appearance in 1974 in Amsterdam, taking the role of Clerio in Francesco Cavalli’s Erismena. Two years later he formed the ensemble Concerto Vocale, with which he would participate in countless performances and recordings. By the 1980s his conducting schedule had grown heavy, yet he still sang, frequently within the same programs, and prepared critical editions for performance, most notably for the 1989 Montpellier production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea that he directed. During the 1990s he consolidated his standing as a leading interpreter of Mozart’s operas on disc; the 1998 Così fan tutte he made for Harmonia Mundi became one of the label’s strongest sellers. Other projects also attracted notice, including his presentations of Haydn’s Il mondo della luna at the 2001 Innsbruck Early Music Festival and the following year at the Staatsoper unter den Linden. From 1996 until 2009 he served as artistic director of the Innsbruck festival.
Jacobs has maintained an intensive schedule of concerts and recordings into the present century; more than two hundred of his releases appear on such labels as Harmonia Mundi, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, and Berlin Classics. His honors include multiple Cannes Classical Awards—one of them for the 2004 recording of Handel’s Rinaldo—as well as more than ten Diapason d’Or prizes, among them the 2005 award for Haydn’s The Seasons, and the 2005 Grammy for his version of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. In 2021 Harmonia Mundi issued his reading of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the Freiburger Barockorchester and Berlin RIAS Kammerkor.
