2023-04-20 04:44:00
Strike fire from the sounds: Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts. Bild: Getty
Conductor and choir director Sir John Eliot Gardiner has been one of the leading interpreters of the music of Monteverdi, Handel, Bach and Berlioz for half a century. Today he is eighty years old.
As a great communicator, the conductor and choir director John Eliot Gardiner relied from the outset on ensembles with which he can achieve wonderfully lively musical results: the Monteverdi Choir (founded by him in 1964), the English Baroque Soloists (1978) and the Orchester Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1989).
Take, for example, the recording of Handel’s Italian opera “Tamerlano” from 1985, a great moment in the art of dramatic opera, in which the English Baroque Soloists sing stylishly and poignantly singing soloists with a musically transparent, animating or compassionate counterpart. Gardiner appreciates Handel’s “constant search for dramatic truth”, and he follows it in the stirring recording of the “Messiah”. How differentiated the musicians model delicate lines in addition to the powerful sound effects, for example in the soprano aria “I know that my Redeemer liveth” or at the beginning of the Amen fugue of the final chorus, is exemplary.
Gardiner studied history at King’s College Cambridge. Legend has it that in 1964 his tutor gave him a year’s leave to perform Marian Vespers with music students Claudio Monteverdi in the famous King’s Chapel — the Monteverdi Choir was born. Together they traveled the largely unexplored world of historical performance practice. In cardinal red robes, the choir sang, which will soon, on May 6th, at the coronation of its patron Charles III. in Westminster Abbey, the “Vespers of Mary” in San Marco in Venice, artistically well documented by the BBC.
Gardiner appreciates the “fiery rhetoric” of Monteverdi’s music. During the pandemic, he launched the podcast Monteverdi and his constellation. Gardiner is preparing a birthday present of his own kind when he conducts Hector Berlioz’s ancient opera “Les Troyens” at the Salzburg Festival and the Berlin Music Festival this summer – with “his” Orchester Révolutionnaire et Romantique. One of his most renowned students, the conductor François-Xavier Roth, says in an interview that Gardiner is just as fascinated by Berlioz as a writer and probably also identifies with him as a “misunderstood artist”. He finds comfort in the sheep and cows he keeps as an alternative farmer in Dorset.
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The brightest fixed star for Sir John Eliot — he was knighted by Elizabeth II in 1998 — is without a doubt Johann Sebastian Bach. In 2000, he and the Monteverdi Choir performed all of Bach’s cantatas Sunday following Sunday in a project called “Pilgrimage to Bach” in historic churches such as Weimar, Eisenach or Altenburg. He compares Bach’s colorful design of simple chorales with the preciousness of polychrome medieval manuscripts. Since his early childhood, Bach’s music has been a golden thread in Gardiner’s life; Sir John Eliot Gardiner turns eighty this Thursday.
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