Jos van Veldhoven was artistic director of the Netherlands Bach Society for more than 35 years. Under his leadership, an impressive CD series was created, as well as concert tours in the Netherlands, Europe, the United States, and Japan. Music was not limited to Bach and his contemporaries, but also often included ‘new’ repertoire from the 17th and 18th centuries.
In his programming van Veldhoven knows how to connect tradition and adventure. He is the initiator of All of Bach, an ongoing unprecedented project in which the Netherlands Bach Society performs, records and publishes all of Bach’s works online. More than 20 million followers worldwide now enjoy the widely acclaimed recordings on YouTube.
Van Veldhoven often attracts attention with performances of ‘new’ repertoire within the early music genre. There have been some remarkable performances of oratorios by Telemann and Graun, vespers by Gastoldi, reconstructions of Bach’s St Mark Passion and the Köthener Trauer-Music and many lesser known seventeenth-century oratorios and dialogues. He has also conducted a large number of modern premieres of Baroque operas by such composers as Mattheson, Keiser, Bononcini, Legrenzi, Conti, and Scarlatti. Van Veldhoven is in great demand as a guest conductor, and has conducted the Dutch Chamber Choir, Netherlands Radio Choir, Flemish Radio Choir, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Robert Schumann Philharmonic, Essen Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and many of the Dutch symphony orchestras. Between 2001 and 2010, van Veldhoven worked with director Dietrich Hilsdorf on a cycle of staged Handel oratorios in the opera houses of Bonn and Essen.
Van Veldhoven has been associated with the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague as a teacher of choral conducting for more than 30 years.
In 2007, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands made him a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion for his ground-breaking work in early music.