John Eliot Gardiner [b.1943], a native of Dorset, England, is considered one of the leading conductors of Baroque music. As founder of the Monteverdi Choir in 1964, Gardiner helped revive interest in 17th and 18th century music, which expanded further when his ensembles began the practice of employing period instruments (whether restored antiques or modern-day reproductions) in his various performances and recordings.
Gardiner was very nearly a child prodigy of the podium, beginning his career as a conductor at the age of 15. While studying history and Arabic in his late teens at King’s College, Cambridge, he toured the Middle East as conductor of the Oxford and Cambridge Singers. His work with the aforementioned Monteverdi Choir eventually led him to form the English Baroque Soloists, which made its professional debut in a performance of the Handel pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea, in 1977 at the Innsbruck [Austria] Festival of Early Music.
The first time Gardiner conducted an opera in his native England took place in 1969, when he appeared with the English National Opera for a performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. His debut at Covent Garden came four years later when he conducted a production of Iphigénie en Tauride by Gluck, which was composed in 1779. In the early 1980s, Gardiner was lead conductor for CBC Vancouver [Canada] Orchestra, after which [1983–88] he became music director of Opéra National de Lyon in France.
More recently, Gardiner took a music ensemble on tour throughout the United States and Europe in 2000—the project became known as the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage—where they performed all of Bach’s sacred cantatas over a 52-week period in various churches. He has continued to appear as a guest conductor with some of the world’s most prominent musical ensembles, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic.
Gardiner has made more than 250 recordings on a number of classical labels, primarily DG and Philips. He has also earned quite a few honors along the way. He received the Gramophone “Artist of the Year” award in 1994, was named Klassik Echo’s “Conductor of the Year” in 1995, and that same year became the first conductor to win the Dietrich Buxtehude Prize. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1998.
John Eliot Gardiner leads the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in a selection from the Christmas Oratorio by J.S. Bach: