The early music movement: it’s grown up so quickly, hasn’t it? The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 40 years old in 2026 and if you can remember its debut, back in the 1980s when Beethoven on period instruments was pretty much the wildest thing going, you’re going to feel terribly, terribly old. Right from the start, the OAE was in the vanguard of the second wave. As late as 1978, the gut-strings and Bach brigade had assumed that Mozart was beyond them. The newly founded OAE was straight out of the traps with Weber, Mendelssohn and Schubert – halfway down the 19th century without drawing a breath.

They’re marking their 40th in much the same style: Berlioz with Rattle, Haydn’s Creation and a recreation of Brahms’s final concert in 1897, conducted by current hot ticket Maxim Emelyanychev. That’s the other enduring trait of the OAE: being player-run, they have no chief conductor and book only artists who excite them. The feeling appeared to be mutual last weekend, when they performed a contrasting pair of Beethoven symphonies (the Fourth and Fifth) with the veteran Hungarian conductor Adam Fischer. He was practically bouncing off the podium.

But as of 2026, we’ve had four decades of period........

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