Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born in 1943 in County Dorset. He initially studied history and Arab studies before completing his musical training at Cambridge University, as well as with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He founded the Monteverdi Choir in 1964 and, in 1968, the Monteverdi Orchestra, from which he later formed the English Baroque Soloists. In 1989 Gardiner launched the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, which similarly performs on original instruments but is predominantly dedicated to music of the 19^th century. He has moreover collaborated with many leading orchestras. In the 2016-17 season, for example, he was a guest artist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra; in June 2016, following a ten-year hiatus, he returned to the Berlin Philharmonic. As an opera conductor, Gardiner has led many productions at the Châtelet in Paris and at Covent Garden in London; for the Monteverdi trilogy he is performing in nine countries in 2017, he is also appearing as a director. Since 2014 he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Bach Archive in Leipzig. In the 2014-15 season he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. Sir John Eliot Gardiner has recorded more than 250 CDs, which have received such distinctions as the Gramophone Award, the German Record Critics’ Prize, and the ECHO Klassik. His book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and was published in German translation in the fall of 2016. In 1998 John Eliot Gardiner was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2005 he received the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig and the Sonning Music Prize. Gardiner is a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Chévalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 2 September 1994 with Mozart’s Thamos, König in Ägypten and the Mass in C minor.

April 2017