Awarded to FRIEDER BERNIUS in 2009, the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig acknowledges a life's engagement with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, his pupils and his family. That quest began in the family home, a pastor's residence that gave him early access to Bach's organ music, violin compositions and choral works. As a student at the Stuttgart College of Music, he initially responded to the city's "Romantic" Bach tradition, but the ideas of Hans Grischkat and encounters with artists outside Germany soon committed him to an engagement with the historical approach to performance that he has maintained to this day. The formation of a Baroque orchestra of his own in 1985 and the establishment of the International Festival of Early Music (1987, "Stuttgart Barock" since 2004) prove him to be a pioneer of historical performance practice. He has since been the guest of many renowned European festivals and has performed some 80 of Bach's cantatas and most notably his Motets, the B minor Mass and the St Matthew Passion (Salzburg, Vienna, Bruges, Madrid, Paris, Barcelona and Munich).