- Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity.
- George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel was a German-born British Baroque composer who was a leading composer of concerti grossi, operas and oratorios. Born in Germany as Georg Friederich Händel, he dwelt during most of his adult life in England, becoming a subject of the British crown on 22 January 1727. His most famous works are "Messiah", an oratorio set to texts from the King James Bible, "Water Music" and "Music for the Royal Fireworks".
- Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (October 26, 1685 - July 23, 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in Spain and Portugal. He was extremely influential in the development of the Classical period in music through his individual style, though he lived mostly during the Baroque era.
- Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell (September 10 (?),, 1659–November 21, 1695), a Baroque composer, is generally considered to be one of England's greatest composers. He has often been called England's finest native composer. Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements but devised a peculiarly English style of Baroque music.
- William Byrd
William Byrd (c. 1540 - 4 July 1623) was an English composer of the Renaissance. He lived until well into the seventeenth century without writing music in the new Baroque fashion, but his keyboard works are said to have marked the beginning of the Baroque organ and harpsichord style.
- John Eliot Gardiner
Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE (born April 20, 1943, Fontmell Magna, Dorset, England) is an English conductor. He founded the Monteverdi Choir (1966), the English Baroque Soloists (1978) and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1990). Gardiner recorded over 250 albums with these and other musical ensembles, most of which have been published by Deutsche Grammophon and Philips Classics.
- Ton Koopman
Ton Koopman (born October 12, 1944 in Zwolle, Netherlands) is a conductor, organist and harpsichordist. Koopman had a "classical education" and then studied the organ (with Simon C. Jansen), harpsichord (with Gustav Leonhardt) and musicology in Amsterdam. He specialized in Baroque music and received the Prix d'Excellence for both organ and harpsichord.
- Jordi Savall
Jordi Savall i Bernadet (born 1941, in Igualada, Spain) is a Spanish viol player, conductor, and composer. He has been one of the major figures in the field of early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for bringing the viol (viola da gamba) back to life on the stage. His repertory ranges from Medieval to Renaissance and Baroque music.
- Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau (September 25, 1683 - September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera, and was attacked by those who preferred Lully's style.
- Peter Paul Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish and European painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, …
- Trevor Pinnock
Trevor David Pinnock CBE (born December 16, 1946) is an English conductor and harpsichordist. He is best known for directing period-performance orchestra The English Concert from the harpsichord for over 30 years in baroque and early classical music.
- Tintoretto
Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Comin; September 29, 1518 - May 31, 1594) was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance. In his youth he was also called Jacopo Robusti, as his father had defended the gates of Padua in a rather robust way against the imperial troops. His real name 'Comin' has only recently been discovered by Miguel Falomir, the curator of the Prado, …
- Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti (May 2, 1660 - October 24, 1725) was a Baroque composer especially famous for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. He was the father of two other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti.
- Johann Pachelbel
Johann Pachelbel (baptized September 1, 1653 - March 3, 1706) was a German Baroque composer, organist and teacher who brought the south German organ tradition to its peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, and his contributions to the development of the chorale prelude and fugue have earned him a place among the most important composers of the middle Baroque.
- Andrew Manze
Andrew Manze (born 14th January 1965, Beckenham) is an English baroque violinist and conductor. Having first started playing the baroque violin while studying Classics at Cambridge University, he went on to study with Simon Standage, one of the founding members of The English Concert, at the Royal Academy of Music, followed by further studies with Lucy van Dael at The Hague and Marie Leonhardt.
- Tomaso Albinoni
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (June 8, 1671, Venice, Republic of Venice - January 17, 1751, Venice, Republic of Venice) was a Venetian Baroque composer. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is mainly remembered today for his instrumental music, some of which is regularly recorded. The "Adagio in G minor" attributed to him (actually a later reconstruction) is one of the most frequently recorded pieces of Baroque music.
- Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643 - February 24, 1704) was a French composer of the Baroque era. He was a prolific and versatile composer, producing music of the highest quality in several genres. His mastery in the composition of sacred vocal music was recognized and acknowledged by his contemporaries.
- Nicholas McGegan
Nicholas McGegan is a British harpsichordist, flutist, conductor and early music expert. Educated at Cambridge and Oxford universities, McGegan participated in some of the earliest authentic-performance recordings during the 1970s as a baroque flutist, including Christopher Hogwood's seminal recordings of Mozart symphonies. McGegan has had long-term appointments with San Francisco's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Germany's International Handel-Festival Göttingen, …
- Marc Minkowski
Marc Minkowski is a French conductor of mostly Baroque works and French Neoclassical music, born in Paris in 1962. His father was Alexandre Minkowski. Marc Minkowski is a Chevalier du Mérite. He began his musical career as a bassoonist for either René Clemencic's Clemencic Consort or Philippe Pierlot's Ricercar Consort. In 1982 Minkowski formed "Les Musiciens du Louvre", …
- François Couperin
François Couperin (November 10, 1668 - September 11, 1733) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. François Couperin was known as "Couperin le Grand" (Couperin the Great) to distinguish him from the other members of the musically talented Couperin family.
- Giovanni Gabrieli
Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557 - August 12, 1612) was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.
- Raymond Leppard
Raymond John Leppard, CBE (born August 1, 1927) is a well-known British conductor and harpsichordist. In the 1960s, Leppard played an instrumental role in the rebirth of interest in baroque music; in particular, he was one of the first major conductors to perform baroque opera.
- Roger Norrington
The scholarly English conductor, Roger (Arthur Carver) Norrington , is a native of Oxford, England, where he came from a University family with strong musical connections. He was a talented boy soprano, studied the violin from the age of ten, and singing from seventeen, but his higher education was in English Literature at Cambridge University.
- Dawn Upshaw
Dawn Upshaw, is an American soprano. The recipient of several Grammy- Gramophone-, and Edison Prize-winning discs, Upshaw is at home both in opera and art song, and in repertoire from Baroque to contemporary; many composers, including John Harbison have written for her, and she has worked repeatedly with the director Peter Sellars, in his staging of Händel's "Theodora" at Glyndebourne, his Paris production of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" (1996), …
- Sigiswald Kuijken
Sigiswald Kuijken (born February 16, 1944) is a Belgian violinist, violist, and conductor known for playing on authentic instruments. He was a member of the Alarius Ensemble of Brussels between 1964 to 1972 and formed La Petite Bande in 1972. Since 1971, he has taught Baroque violin at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague and the Koninklijk Muziekconservatorium in Brussels.
- Matthias Goerne
Matthias Goerne (born 1967) is a German baritone. Born in Weimar, he studied with Hans-Joachim Beyer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. His repertoire spans a wide range of music, from baroque to contemporary, but above all he is a celebrated lieder singer. His discography includes award-winning recordings of Mahler and Schubert song cycles.
- Claudio Arrau
Claudio Arrau León was a Chilean pianist of world fame for his deep interpretations of a huge, vast repertoire spanning from the baroque to 20th-century composers. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.
- Jeanne Lamon
Jeanne Lamon, violinist and conductor, born in New York, USA, was raised in New York State, and began studying the violin at the age of seven. Later she attended Brandeis University in Boston where she earned a Bachelor of Music degree studying violin with Robert Koff, the original second violinist of the Juilliard Quartet. From Brandeis University Jeanne left the USA to study in Holland with Hermann Krebbers, …
- Girolamo Frescobaldi
Girolamo Frescobaldi (baptized mid-September 1583 - March 1, 1643) was an Italian musician, one of the most important composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. There is no evidence that the Frescobaldi of Ferrara were related to the homonymous Florentine noble house.
- Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini ("Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini"; December 7, 1598 - November 28, 1680) was a pre-eminent Baroque sculptor and architect of 17th century Rome.
- Simon Standage
Simon Andrew Thomas Standage (born 8th November 1941 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire) is an English violinist and conductor best known for playing and conducting music of the baroque and classical eras on original instruments.
- Christopher Parkening
Christopher Parkening is an American classical guitarist. Parkening was born in Los Angeles, California, and pursued music in part because of his cousin Jack Marshall, a studio musician in the 1960s. Marshall first introduced Parkening to the recordings of Andrés Segovia when he was 11, and encouraged Parkening to begin his guitar studies with classical guitar. By the time he was 19, he had won a number of competitions and was touring and recording extensively.
- Guido Reni
Guido Reni (November 4, 1575 - August 18, 1642) was a prominent Italian painter of high-Baroque style.
- Annibale Carracci
Annibale Carracci (November 3, 1560 - July 15, 1609 was an Italian Baroque painter.
- Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega (also Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio or Lope Félix de Vega Carpio was a Spanish Baroque playwright and poet. His reputation in the world of Spanish letters is second only to that of Cervantes, …
- Thomas Quasthoff
Thomas Quasthoff (born in Hildesheim, Germany, November 9, 1959) is a German bass-baritone generally regarded as one of the finest singers of his generation. Although his reputation was initially based on his performance of Romantic lieder, Quasthoff has proven to have a remarkable range from the Baroque cantatas of Bach to solo jazz improvisations.
- Hopkinson Smith
Hopkinson Smith is an American lutenist. Born in New York, he graduated from Harvard with Honors in Music. He came to Europe in 1973 to study with Emilio Pujol, a great pedagogue in the highest Catalan artistic tradition, and also Eugen Dombois, whose sense of organic unity between performer, instrument and historical period has had a lasting effect on him.
- Anner Bylsma
Anner Bylsma (born Anner Bijlsma February 17 1934, The Hague) is a Dutch cellist who plays on both modern and authentic baroque style instruments. He took an interest in music from an early age. He studied with Carel van Boomkamp at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and won the "Prix d'excellence" in 1957. In 1959, he won first prize in the Pablo Casals Competition in Mexico.
- Sandrine Piau
Sandrine Piau is an opera soprano. Trained as a harpist, she studied voice at the Collège Lamartine and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique du Paris. She is best known for her roles in Baroque opera, having worked with William Christie at the Festival international d'Art Lyrique at Aix-en-Provence. She has since collaborated with many of the leading European conductors of the Baroque revival, including Marc Minkowski, Philippe Herreweghe, Paul McCreesh, …
- Véronique Gens
Véronique Gens is a French soprano. She has spent much of her career recording and performing Baroque music. Gens studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. Her debut in 1986 was with conductor William Christie. She has since worked with Marc Minkowski, René Jacobs, Christophe Rousset, Philippe Herreweghe, and Jean-Claude Malgoire. While she started out as a Baroque specialist, she has become in demand for roles in Mozart operas, and an interpreter of songs by Berlioz, …