Jos van Veldhoven

In addition to guest conducting many choirs and orchestras in the Netherlands, Europe, and far beyond, Jos van Veldhoven is currently Artistic Partner of the Oregon Bach Festival in the United States.

For more than 35 years he was Artistic Director of the famous Netherlands Bach Society and developed this 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 often ‘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.

Jos van Veldhoven 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 140 million music lovers worldwide now enjoy the widely acclaimed recordings on YouTube and the Netherlands Bach Society’s own channel and they have received large acclaim all over the world.

Jos van Veldhoven often attracts attention with performances of ‘new’ repertoire within the early music genre. There have been some remarkable performances of oratorios by Telemann and Graun, vespers by Gastoldi, reconstructions of Bach’s St Mark Passion and the Köthener Trauer-Music and many lesser-known 17th-century oratorios and dialogues. He has also conducted a large number of modern premieres of Baroque operas by such composers as Mattheson, Keiser, Bononcini, Legrenzi, Conti, and Scarlatti. Jos van Veldhoven is in great demand as a guest conductor, and 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 Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and many of the Dutch symphony orchestras. Between 2001 and 2010, Jos van Veldhoven worked with director Dietrich Hilsdorf on a cycle of staged Handel oratorios in the opera houses of Bonn and Essen.

Jos van Veldhoven 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 ground-breaking work in early music.