John Eliot Gardiner

One of the leading figures in music performance since the second half of the 20th century, John Eliot Gardiner was born in Fontmell Magna, Dorset, England. He trained at Cambridge University before studying music at King's College London with Thurston Dart, then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in 1967-1968. In 1964, at the age of twenty, he founded the Monteverdi Choir, which quickly established itself as a key player in the revival of Baroque music. In 1969, he made his debut at London's Promenade Concerts and conducted his first opera, Mozart's The Magic Flute, at the London Coliseum. He made his Covent Garden debut in 1973 with Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. In 1977, he founded the English Baroque Soloists, a period-instrument ensemble with which he recorded landmark performances of Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine (1985), Bach's B minor Mass and St John Passion (1986), Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1987) and Handel's Messiah (1989). At the same time, he pursued an international career on modern instruments, notably in the USA, where he conducted the CBC Vancouver Symphony Orchestra between 1980 and 1983. Appointed Music Director of the Opéra de Lyon in 1983, a post he held until 1988, he radically renewed the orchestra and enjoyed great success with Mozart operas(Idoménée, Les Noces de Figaro, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni). In 1987, the University of Lyon awarded him an honorary doctorate. From 1991 to 1994, he conducted the Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 1990, at the end of his tenure at the Handel Festival in Göttingen, he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with whom he performed Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms on period instruments. His recording of Berlioz's Grande Messe des morts won him a Grammy Award in 1994, a year also marked by the recording of the complete Beethoven Symphonies . From 1992 onwards, he embarked on a vast cycle of Bach cantatas, culminating in the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage world tour in 2000, the recordings of which appeared on his Soli Deo Gloria label. In the years 2000 and 2010, John Eliot Gardiner pursued an intense recording and touring activity, notably with the Monteverdi Choir and landmark new releases such as Bach's Motets (2012). In 2013, the boxed set The John Eliot Gardiner Collection summarizes his work in thirty volumes. Anointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989, he was made a Peer of the United Kingdom in 1998, Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2011 and inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012. In 2023, after conducting the Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists at the coronation ceremony of King Charles III, John Eliot Gardiner was accused of slapping a singer during rehearsals for a performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens . Since this incident, which led to his resignation from the three ensembles he founded, the conductor created the Constellation Choir and Orchestra, also known as Springhead Constellation, in September 2024. In the meantime, the 64-CD boxed set The Complete Recordings on Erato has been released.