The Monteverdi Choir was founded in 1964 by John Eliot Gardiner for a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. The Choir’s original goal was to explore the music of the Baroque in all its different facets, but eventually its repertoire extended through various epochs, genres, and styles. Concerts throughout the world have made the Monteverdi Choir the epitome of a passionate and highly cultivated brand of choral singing. The most impressive project in its history to date is the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage of 2000 Jahr 2000, when the Choir celebrated the 250th anniversary of the death of the Leipzig master by performing his complete cantatas in more than sixty European churches. Currently the recordings of these concerts are being released on CD; the first of these has already garnered Gramophone magazine’s Record of the Year Award. The Monteverdi Choir regularly gives opera performances in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, including productions of Verdi’s Falstaff, Weber’s Oberon, and Les Troyens of Berlioz. In December 2007 they also began collaborating with the Opéra Comique in Paris, where the Choir has appeared in a new interpretation of Chabrier’s L’Etoile and, in June 2009, in performances of Bizet’s Carmen. In the context of a “Special Week with Sir John Eliot Gardiner” in 2007, the Monteverdi Choir offered a series of concerts in Paris’s Cité de la Musique focusing on the music of Rameau and his contemporaries. After a tour featuring five different Brahms programs, which the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Gardiner performed in the past year throughout Europe, the Choir has been focusing in 2009 on the twin anniversaries of Joseph Haydn and Georg Friedrich Handel.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on September 2, 1994 in Mozart’s Thamos, König in Ägypten and the C minor Mass, K. 427 (417a). Previous appearance on August 24, 1999 performing Schumann’s “Scenes from Goethe’s Faust” – both concerts were conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.