HARRY CHRISTOPHERS
Harry Christophers enters his third season as Artistic Director of the Handel and Haydn Society with the 2011–2012 Season. Appointed in 2008, he began his tenure with the 2009–2010 Season and has conducted Handel and Haydn each season since September 2006, when he led a sold-out performance in the Esterházy Palace at the Haydn Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria. Christophers and H&H have since embarked on an ambitious artistic journey that began with the 2010–2011 Season with a showcase of works premiered in the United States by the Handel and Haydn Society over the last 195 years, and the release of the first of a series of recordings on CORO leading to the 2015 Bicentennial. Christophers is known internationally as founder and conductor of the UK-based choir and period instrument ensemble The Sixteen. He has directed The Sixteen throughout Europe, America, and the Far East, gaining a distinguished reputation for his work in Renaissance, Baroque, and 20th-century music. In 2000, he instituted the “Choral Pilgrimage,” a tour of British cathedrals from York to Canterbury. He has recorded close to 100 titles for which he has won numerous awards, including a Grand Prix du Disque for Handel Messiah, numerous Preise der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics Awards), the coveted Gramophone Award for Early Music, and the prestigious Classical Brit Award (2005) for his disc entitled Renaissance. In 2009, he received one of classical music’s highest accolades, the Classic FM Gramophone Awards Artist of the Year Award, and The Sixteen won the Baroque Vocal Award for Handel Coronation Anthems, a CD that also received a 2010 Grammy Award nomination. Harry Christophers is also Principal Guest Conductor of the Granada Symphony Orchestra and a regular guest conductor with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the Orquestra de la Comunidad de Madrid. In October 2008, Christophers was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music from the University of Leicester. Most recently, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and also of the Royal Welsh Academy for Music and Drama.

KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT
Kristian Bezuidenhout, born in South Africa in 1979, began his studies in Australia and completed them summa cum laude at the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Rebecca Penneys, Malcolm Bilson, and Paul O’Dette. He first gained international recognition at the age of 21 after winning the prestigious first prize as well as the audience prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition (2001), a double honour, this being only the third time the former prize has been awarded in the history of the competition.

Bezuidenhout is a frequent guest artist with the world’s leading ensembles including The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, The Orchestra of the 18th Century, Concerto Köln, The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Collegium Vocale Ghent, and the Handel and Haydn Society. He has performed with celebrated artists including Frans Brüggen, Pieter Wispelwey, Daniel Hope, Viktoria Mullova, and Christopher Hogwood, and he regularly gives Lied recitals with, among others, Carolyn Sampson, Mark Padmore, and Jan Kobow. He now has a standing duo with the Baroque violinist Petra Müllejans, Artistic Director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; their first CD, a disc of Mozart Violin Sonatas, was released on Harmonia Mundi USA in the Spring of 2009.

Bezuidenhout now divides his time between fortepiano, harpsichord, and modern piano engagements and has appeared in the early music festivals of Barcelona, Boston, Bruges, St. Petersburg, Venice, and Utrecht, and the Saintes Festival, La Roque D’Anthéron, the Chopin Festival Warsaw, Musikfest Bremen, the Tanglewood Festival, Mostly Mozart Lincoln Center, and the Gstaad Festival. He is now a guest professor at both the Eastman School of Music and the Schola Cantorum in Basel; in 2007 he was awarded the Erwin Bodky prize.

TERESA NEFF
Teresa Neff received her PhD in Musicology from Boston University. Her research interests center around Gottfried van Swieten, a late 18th-century Viennese patron and composer. Neff’s edition of Swieten’s symphonies will be published by Artaria later this year. She has presented papers at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society, and the Architecture/Music/Acoustics Conference. She presents concert preview lectures for Elderhostel and Boston Lyric Opera, and also teaches at the