Born in Nottingham, Hogwood went to The Skinners' School, Royal Tunbridge Wells, and then studied Music and Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in 1964.

He went on to study performance and conducting under Raymond Leppard, Mary Potts and Thurston Dart, and later with Rafael Puyana and Gustav Leonhardt.

He was Artistic Director of Boston's Handel and Haydn Society from 1986 to 2001, and for the remainder of his life held the title of Conductor Laureate.

In 2009, he returned to the Royal Opera House to conduct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and Handel's Acis and Galatea.

In late 2010 and early 2011, he conducted a series of performances of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Zürich Opera House.

[5] Although Hogwood was best known for the baroque and classical repertoire, he also performed romantic and contemporary music, with a particular affinity for the neobaroque and neoclassical schools including many works by Stravinsky, Martinů and Hindemith.

[1] He made many solo recordings of harpsichord works (including Louis Couperin, J. S. Bach, Thomas Arne, William Byrd's My Lady Nevells Booke), and did much to promote the clavichord in the Secret Bach/Handel/Mozart series of recordings, which puts in historical context the most common domestic instrument of that epoch.

[6] In July 2010, he was appointed Professor of Music at Gresham College, London, a position originally held by John Bull.

[citation needed] Hogwood's editing work included music by composers as diverse as John Dowland and Felix Mendelssohn.

After John Walsh's collection The Harpsichord Master Book I was rediscovered in New Zealand in 1977 (containing two otherwise new/unknown works by Purcell), Hogwood edited the re-issue on Oxford University Press reissue in 1980.

[16] In 2012 Hogwood's musicological activities came to the attention of a wider public when the BBC and the Guardian newspaper announced his discovery of a "previously unknown" piano piece by Johannes Brahms.

[21] Hogwood's edition of the piece was published by Bärenreiter in February 2012 along with the Horn Trio in E-flat major, Op.