Martin Pearlman

Martin Pearlman (born May 21, 1945 in Chicago) is an American conductor, harpsichordist, composer, and early music specialist. He founded the first permanent Baroque orchestra in North America with Boston Baroque (originally called Banchetto Musicale) in 1973–74. Many of its original players went on to play in or direct other ensembles in what became a growing field in the American music scene. He later founded the chorus of that ensemble and was the music director of Boston Baroque from its inception up to 2025. He retired as director at the end of the 2024-25 season.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Pearlman received training in composition, violin, piano, and theory. He received a B. A. in 1967 from Cornell University, where he resided at the Telluride House, studied composition with Karel Husa and Robert Palmer and began studying harpsichord with Donald Paterson.

After Cornell, Mr. Pearlman studied harpsichord with renowned harpsichordist and early music pioneer Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam on a Fulbright Grant (1967–68). In 1971, he received an M. M. in composition from Yale University, studying composition with Yehudi Wyner and harpsichord with noted harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, and worked in the electronic music studio.

In 1971, he moved to Boston, where he won the Erwin Bodky competition as a harpsichordist and began performing widely in solo recitals and concertos. In 1973–74, he founded Boston Baroque (which was called Banchetto Musicale until 1992). With that ensemble, he has conducted many American and world period-instrument premieres of operas, choral works, and instrumental works, including Mozart operas and major works of Bach, Handel and Monteverdi. He has directed Boston Baroque in an annual subscription series in Boston, toured with the ensemble in the U.S. and Europe, and made recordings (principally for Telarc International), three of which have been nominated for Grammy awards (see www.bostonbaroque.org).

With modern-instrument ensembles, Pearlman made his Kennedy Center debut conducting The Washington Opera in Handel's Semele, led the National Arts Center Orchestra of Ottawa in the Monteverdi Vespers, and has conducted the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis, the Utah Opera in Salt Lake City, Opera Columbus, Boston Lyric Opera, San Antonio Symphony, the New World Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Alabama Symphony and others.

Pearlman is the only conductor from the period-instrument field to have performed live on the internationally televised Grammy Awards show.

Although conducting is his main focus, Pearlman is also a successful composer, an acclaimed harpsichordist and respected scholar.

Recent compositions include: a string quartet, piano works, a comic chamber opera The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; his 3-act Finnegans Grand Operoar: an Operoar on texts by James Joyce; The Creation According to Orpheus for piano, harp and percussion soloists with string orchestra; Beethoven Fantasy on WoO77 for solo piano, and music for three Samuel Beckett plays (Words and Music (play), Cascando, ... but the clouds ...), commissioned by the 92nd Street Y in New York for the Beckett centennial in 2006 and produced there and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.