English Baroque Soloists / Monteverdi Choir & Soloists / Gardiner

«No half measures»

Alongside Ton Koopman and Joshua Rifkin, Sir John Eliot Gardiner is one of the most eminent living interpreters of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. As a tribute to his musical achievements, the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft has awarded Gardiner, who is also president of the Leipzig Bach Archive, an honorary membership. Following in the footsteps of Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Austria a decade earlier, Sir John Eliot Gardiner was a pioneer of historically informed performance practice in the late 1960s. After setting up the «Monteverdi Choir» in 1964, he founded the «English Baroque Soloists» in 1978. With both ensembles he has since explored all sorts of different areas of so-called „ancient music“, but returned time and again to Bach. Unlike, say, Koopman, who is a keyboard player by training, Gardiner’s approach comes from the voice and from singing. Diction and language in general determines his interpretative approach, not only of vocal music of past eras. His descriptions of the «Denglisch», in which British choirs performed Bach’s music in the postwar years are truly touching … Gardiner’s decades-long preoccupation with the works of the Leipzig cantor culminated in 2000 with the unprecedented «Bach-Pilgrimage», a marathon tour of 90 concerts in 15 countries during which all of Bach’s cantatas were performed on the exact day of the liturgical calendar. A nightmare come true for every tour manager, but Sir John Eliot Gardiner is famous — and notorious — for accepting no half measures. And we can only be grateful for that!