School of Rock
Random article All articles A–Z
2 languages

John Eliot Gardiner

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is an English conductor, born in Fontmell Magna, Dorset, in 1943. He grew up with singing in the family and in a church choir, played the violin and began conducting at fifteen. As a history student at Cambridge he conducted Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine in the chapel of King's College in 1964. Around that performance the Monteverdi Choir came into being. Later he studied in London and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

Music and breakthrough

Gardiner built up three ensembles of his own. In 1968 he founded the Monteverdi Orchestra, which in 1977 switched to period instruments and in 1978 took the name English Baroque Soloists. In 1990 the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique followed, for nineteenth-century music. He was also music director of the Opéra National de Lyon and principal conductor of the North German Radio Orchestra. He recorded more than two hundred and fifty albums, mainly for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips and his own label Soli Deo Gloria.

Influence

His name is above all linked with Johann Sebastian Bach. In the year 2000, during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he performed all of Bach's church cantatas, spread over a year and over churches in Europe and New York, in the order of the church year. He also wrote the book Music in the Castle of Heaven and presented the documentary Bach: A Passionate Life. In this way he helped bring period-instrument performance practice to a wide audience.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to his 1982 recording of Handel's Water Music and notice the difference in tone colour between the Baroque wind instruments and a modern symphony orchestra.

Discography

Studio albums

Categories: Artists