From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor enjoys revisiting the recordings of the great pioneering conductor, John Eliot Gardiner
In the family home, a painting of JS Bach stared down at the young John Eliot Gardiner with a severity at odds with what he discovered in Bach’s music. Sir John Eliot Gardiner –
Complete Deutsche Grammophon & Archiv Produktion Recordings (DG 483 9963; 104 CDS) is alphabetically arranged, so we begin with his Bach Passions, B minor Mass, Magnificat, cantatas and Christmas Oratorio in the 1980s and ’90s; milestones in historically informed performance that have hardly dated. Then follows Beethoven with the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique in recordings that had a significant impact on the acceptance of period instrument performances: the symphonies, piano concertos with Robert Levin and the Missa solemnis are still thrillingly alive over a quarter-of-a-century later.
It was a student performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers that led to the founding of the Monteverdi Choir, and what later became the English Baroque Soloists. They marked the choir’s 25th anniversary with a famous live recording of the Vespers in St Mark’s, Venice in 1989, still as vivid and theatrical as any.
Then come 27 discs of Mozart: the pioneering complete piano concertos with Malcolm Bilson, and seven operas, including one of the finest Idomeneos on record and a combustible Don Giovanni.
Gardiner is not just an early music and period instrument specialist: witness his Bruckner, Chabrier and Elgar with the Vienna Philharmonic, and Lehár’s The Merry Widow in a superbly cast, brilliantly realised performance. Then Mahler and Zemlinsky songs with Anne Sofie von Otter, who joins Ian Bostridge and
Bryn Terfel in a fresh and engaging account of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Missing is most of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage from 2000: Archiv pulled the plug on the project, which led to the founding of Gardiner’s own label SDG. The other major omission is his viscerally exciting Berlioz, despite being made within the same stable of labels for Philips. But nonetheless this set presents a recorded legacy that communicates with undimmed immediacy.