John Eliot Gardiner & Monteverdi Choir
Biography John Eliot Gardiner & Monteverdi Choir
John Eliot Gardiner
Regarded as one of the most versatile conductors of our time, John Eliot Gardiner appears regularly with such leading symphony orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony and Czech Philharmonic. Formerly artistic director of Opéra de Lyon, Gardiner has, since 2006, conducted new productions of Carmen, Pelléas et Mélisande, Chabrier’s L’Etoile and the Weber-Berlioz Le Freyschutz at the Opéra Comique in Paris. This March and April, he conducted Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In June, Gardiner leads the Monteverdi Choir in a program of English polyphony on tour in the U.K. and France, along with a July performance at the Salzburg Festival. He conducts Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts at the Festival de Saint-Denis in June with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre National de France. At London’s Royal Albert Hall in July, Gardiner conducts a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande with the Monteverdi Choir and, in a first for London with the opera, the period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Also in July at the Salzburg Festival, he leads the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in Haydn’s The Creation.
Acknowledged as a key figure in the early-music revival of the past four decades, Gardiner is the founder and artistic director of the period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and English Baroque Soloists, as well as the Monteverdi Choir. With these ensembles, he has undertaken a number of ambitious large-scale tours; upcoming projects include a musical journey in 2014 that retraces the old pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome – the Via Francigena – with a cappella music of the 15th & 16th centuries. The extent of Gardiner’s repertoire is illustrated by more than 250 recordings he has made for major labels and by numerous international awards, including Gramophone magazine’s Special Achievement Award for his live recordings of J.S. Bach’s sacred cantatas. As the recipient of more Gramophone Awards than any other living artist, Gardiner was recently inducted as one of the 50 inaugural members of the Gramophone Hall of Fame.
In recognition of his work, Gardiner has received several international prizes, along with honorary doctorates from the University of Lyon, the New England Conservatory of Music and the University of Cremona. In 1992, he became an Honorary Fellow of both King's College London and the Royal Academy of Music, and he was made a Visiting Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge in 2007-2008. In 1990, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and then a Knight Bachelor in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours List. In 2008, he was awarded the Royal Academy of Music / Kohn Foundation's prestigious Bach Prize. He was named Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1996 and was made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2010.
Soli Deo Gloria
SDG was created in 2005 with the aim to release more than 50 live recordings made in 2000 during the Monteverdi Choir’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, an event that celebrated the Millennium with performances of Bach’s sacred cantatas around the world. Shortly after the label’s launch, its first release won Record of the Year at the Gramophone Awards, and all subsequent releases have won international acclaim for the performances by John Eliot Gardiner conducting his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists. At the behest of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, SDG then released the first recording of a newly discovered piece by J.S. Bach, Alles mit Gott. The label also made headlines with a CD of two Mozart symphonies, recorded live during a concert at London's Cadogan Hall and released at the end of the evening. Another special recording project, "Pilgrimage to Santiago," followed an acclaimed concert tour along the route to Compostela and received as much praise as the concerts themselves.
Autumn 2007 saw the first SDG recordings with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, recorded at the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Salle Pleyel in Paris during the “Brahms and his Antecedents” concert cycle, yielding a five-album series. The label has also issued live recordings of Bach’s St. John Passion and music by Johann Christoph Bach. This fall, SDG will release a six-CD boxed set drawn from the Bach cantata series, including the popular Christmas Cantatas. Earlier this month, Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists recorded live concerts of Bach’s Ascension Cantatas, so as to provide an appendix to the Pilgrimage series that will serve as SDG’s 28th and final volume of his sacred cantatas.
