Christopher Hogwood

Born: September 10, 1941; Died: September 24, 2014

Christopher Hogwood, who has died aged 73, was the founder of the Academy of Ancient Music and played a major role in the British revival of baroque and classical music.

A brisk and affable conductor, he was a familiar figure at the Edinburgh Festival, particularly during Brian McMaster's period as director.

But he was no ordinary pedagogue, though he held an infinite number of scholarly appointments, wrote scholarly books, received awards and was an authority on the clavichord, a keyboard instrument whose whispering tone made it almost inaudible to most people's ears.

Yet he found it fascinating enough to form the basis of his own private collection of old instruments, which he stored at his home in Cambridge.

In public an elegant and dapper musician, he never seemed particularly severe or fuddy-duddy on the concert platform. The Academy of Ancient Music, which he formed in 1973, may have possessed a faintly whimsical name, more suggestive of the world of Gerard Hoffnung than something more serious, but it was the brilliant answer, full of real scholarly talent, to the proliferation at that time of ensembles that turned out, all too often, to be historically inept.

Along with other gifted pioneers, including David Munrow, Roger Norrington, and Sir John Eliot Gar-diner, he altered the situation in a flash, showing that authenticity could be valuable and illuminating.

As he put it himself last year, the historically informed movement was really just one way of doing things.

"There is nothing wrong with playing things historically completely incorrectly," he asserted.

"Music is not a moral business, so you can play absolutely in a style that suits you and pleases your public. It may be completely unrecognisable to the composer but so what - he is dead."

The point about the Academy of Ancient Music was that, under his guidance, it did what it did so convincingly (and still does so under his successor Richard Egarr) it quickly rose to the top of its tree as a nonpareil ensemble which could transform the sound of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart - three Hogwood specialities - into something startlingly fresh and above all rewarding.

At the Queen's Hall (more his sort of Edinburgh setting than the Usher Hall) he was heard as conductor and harpsichordist to perfection.

Yet to see him in his white evening jacket, leaning during the interval on the wall at the rear entrance and gazing musingly at the neighbouring back greens, was to be reminded that there was a private side to him that was visible in various ways, not only in his enthusiasm for the clavichord, but in his series of recordings in which he employed the word "secret," as in "the secret Mozart" and so forth.

Yet he was easy to interview, whe-ther in private or in public, as this writer once did, in front of a sizeable audience in the Festival Theatre.

His promised return to Edinburgh next year, when he was booked to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Haydn's Creation, is something in which Richard Egarr (who works frequently with the orchestra) will surely replace him, but he will be greatly missed.

Born in Nottingham, Christopher Hogwood was the son of the flamboyantly named Haley Hogwood and Marion Higgott.

Educated at Nottingham High School and the Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells, he studied music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and learnt the harpsichord from Rafael Puyana, Mary Potts, and the great Gustav Leonhardt, with Raymond Leppard among his conducting teachers.

He made his name in the 1960s as a member of David Munrow's Early Music Consort, which supplied the soundtracks for the famous BBC series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R, full of the strains of obscure wind instruments and the tinkle of the Hogwood harpsichord.

But it was the founding of the Academy of Ancient Music, with its emphasis on precise musical notation and style, that obsessed him.

Yet scholarship was not the group's be-all and end-all. His attitude to tempo could seem quirky. He was accused of performing Handel and Mozart too fast, to which he responded by saying that he was simply the umpire and adding that he was "for democracy to the point of anarchy".

Yet his scholarship remained impeccable to the extent that he was invited to take control of one musical foundation after another, most famously in 1986 the great Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Massachusetts, formed in 1815 to uphold the music of these composers.

As with foundations, so with orchestras. Though mostly linked with period instrument groups, he found himself beckoned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra of Minnesota and even, under the aegis of its manager Ernest Fleischmann, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which he conducted a gargantuan amplified performance of Messiah at the Hollywood Bowl.

In later years he showed an increasing willingness to move out of baroque music and into the realms of Stravinsky, Britten, and Tippett. But his passion for the harpsichord prevailed and he continued to champion the music of the Couperins, William Byrd, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

As a person he was both sociable and solitary. He lived in a 19th-century Cambridge house and died after suffering for some months from an unspecified ailment.

He is survived by three younger sisters and a brother.