Opera Lafayette - Nachtmusique

Nachtmusique

Nachtmusique is a wind ensemble that specializes in playing music using actual original instruments from the 18^th century. The sextet members are Eric Hoeprich and Toni Salar Verdu on clarinet, Jane Gower and Javier Zafra on bassoon, and Teunis van der Zwart and Erwin Wieringa on horn. Mr. Hoeprich is the Artistic Director.

For the past twenty years Eric Hoeprich has specialized in performing on the historical clarinet. His expertise as a musician, scholar and instrument maker allows for a unique approach to the solo clarinet repertoire of the 18th an 19th centuries.

His activities as a chamber musician take him around the world, both with his wind ensembles Nachtmusique and Stadler Trio, and as a guest with numerous string quartets and pianists. As a scholar Hoeprich has been contracted by Yale University Press to write a comprehensive book on the clarinet as part of a new series on the instruments of the orchestra. He is on the faculty of the Conservatoire de Paris and the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague and has published articles in several journals such as Early Music, Galpin Society Journal, The Clarinet, Tibia and Scherzo, and been interviewed by numerous magazines, newspapers and television & radio stations.

His interest in the early clarinet has led Hoeprich to amass a large collection of 18th and 19th century clarinets. Of particular interest is a clarinet made by the same maker that built the instrument played by Heinrich Bärmann, the clarinettist for whom Weber composed all his great works. He alao owns what is credibly the oldest surviving French clarinet, made in the 1770's by Prudent in Paris. Additionally he has clarinets by Georg Ottensteiner whose instruments were played by Richard Mühlfeld for whom Brahms wrote all his chamber works for clarinet, and a reproduction of Anton Stadler's basset clarinet which Hoeprich made himself based on an engraving from a program in Riga where Stadler performed the Mozart clarinet concerto in 1794.

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