Christopher Hogwood

More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t the only item on the bill, either; it was part of a day-long blow-out that lasted from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and also included the whole of Handel’s Israel in Egypt. The crowd came prepared. According to Adalbert Gyrowetz, a Bohemian composer then living in London, the audience munched on ‘hard-boiled eggs, ham and roast meat’ during the intervals. ‘One had almost to wade through a mass of eggshells and other rubbish on the way out of the church,’ he noted. Romaniw was everything you’d want in a Tosca:

In August 1993, the pianist Robert Levin sat down in Walthamstow Assembly Rooms with the conductor Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) to record the complete piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was big – the bicentenary celebrations of 1991 had made a global impact. And Hogwood and the AAM were big too. After their groundbreaking period-instrument Mozart symphony cycle a decade earlier, the 27 piano concertos seemed like a wholly achievable ambition. What could go wrong? ‘For Mozart’s contemporaries, what surpassed even his virtuosity was his ability to improvise’ Only, as it turned out, the entire classical record industry. The project was meant to take