Robert Hill, professor for historical keyboard instruments and performance practice at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in Germany, studied harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory, receiving his Soloist Diploma in 1974. That same year he co-founded the Baroque chamber music ensemble Musick for the Generall Peace, together with violinist Jeanne Lamon and viola da gambist Sarah Cunningham.
During the early 1980s Robert Hill performed regularly with the ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln and in a duo with its leader Reinhard Goebel. He enjoys playing with both early music specialists and with modern musicians, among them the violinists Gottfried von der Goltz, Rainer Kussmaul, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Christian Tetzlaff, violist Kim Kashkashian, conductors Helmut Müller-Brühl, Nicholas McGegan and Thomas Zehetmair, and orchestras such as the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the Cologne Chamber Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia.
In 1987 Robert Hill received his Ph.D. in Music History from Harvard University for a dissertation under Prof. Christoph Wolff on problems of authenticity and sources of the early keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. From 1986-1990, Robert Hill was Assistant Professor of Musicology and Performance Practice at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina). His current research interests include the reconstruction of nineteenth-century performance practices.
He is winner of the Erwin Bodky Early Music Competition (Boston, 1982), a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Award (Washington, 1983), and the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award (Philadelphia, 1988). The music of J. S. Bach has a central place in Robert Hill’s recorded repertoire. Another of his interests is the keyboard literature of the later eighteenth century. His disc of harpsichord sonatas by Haydn was awarded the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.
The interpretations on this recording may be understood in part as a demonstration of the art of quantitative accentuation, as discussed in Robert Hill’s article “Carl Reinecke’s Performance of Mozart’s ‘Larghetto’ and the Nineteenth-Century Practice of Quantitative Accentuation”, in About Bach (Illinois University Press, 2007).
