Nikolaus Harnoncourt celebrates his 85th birthday on the podium

The Austrian maestro and period-instrument pioneer received ECHO Klassik's Lifetime Achievement Award this year.

He has led his ground-breaking period-instrument ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien for more than sixty years; his complete Bach Cantata cycle for Teldec is one of the great achievements of classical music on record, and maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt shows no signs of slowing down as he celebrated his 85th birthday yesterday, 6 December.

Warner Classics rings in the new year celebrating the Austrian conductor's accomplishments, with the latest album in the ever-popular Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert series to hit shelves 2 January, 2015. The new disc captures Harnoncourt at the podium of this major annual Viennese society event in 2001 and 2003 (alongside Riccardo Muti's 1997 and 2000 stints).

Earlier this year, ECHO Klassik awarded Harnoncourt its Lifetime Achievement Award:

We are pleased to honour, in Nikolaus Harnoncourt, an outstanding personality who has made an enormous contribution to the field of classical music and has repeatedly set new benchmarks,

said Dr. Florian Drücke, Managing Director of the German Music Industry Association.

It was a great year for Harnoncourt on disc, with the release of a boxed set dedicated to hispioneering Monteverdi opera trilogy of 1968-74, featuring the redoutable Cathy Berberian and sounding as fresh and lively as ever.

So how did the maestro choose to spend his 85th birthday? He conducted Haydn's Die Schöpfung with his Concentus Musicus Wien on home turf at the famous Musikverein. Here's to many more concerts with one of the most outstanding conductors of our time!

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.