Jos van Veldhoven
Conductor
In addition to guest conducting many choirs and orchestras in the Netherlands and far beyond, Jos van Veldhoven is currently Artistic Partner of the Oregon Bach Festival in the United States.
Jos was Artistic Director of the Netherlands Bach Society for more than 35 years, where he developed the company into a leading, world-class ensemble. Under his leadership an impressive CD series was created, and he made many concert tours in the Netherlands, Europe, the United States, and Japan. Not only the music of Bach and his contemporaries sounded, but also “new” repertoire from the 17th and 18th centuries. In his programming, Jos van Veldhoven knows how to connect tradition and adventure over and over again.
He is also the initiator of “All of Bach,” an unprecedented project in which the Netherlands Bach Society performs, records, and publishes all of Bach’s works online. More than 20 million followers worldwide now enjoy the recordings on YouTube, and they have received large acclaim all over the world.
Jos often attracts attention with performances of “new” repertoire within the early music genre, including many lesser known seventeenth-century oratorios and dialogues, and a large number of modern premieres of Baroque operas by composers such as Mattheson, Keiser, Bononcini, Legrenzi, Conti, and Scarlatti. In great demand as a guest conductor, Jos has conducted— among others—the Dutch Chamber Choir, the Netherlands Radio Choir, the Flemish Radio Choir, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, the Robert Schumann Philharmonic, the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and many of the Dutch symphony orchestras.
Jos has been associated with the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague as a teacher of choral conducting for more than 30 years. In 2007, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands made him a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion for his groundbreaking work in early music.