It comes as little surprise after the events of last summer that John Eliot Gardiner has formally severed all links with the three pioneering ensembles that he established, the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Gardiner apologised and publicly stated remorse over the incident after a performance of Berlioz’s Les Troyens in August last year, when allegedly he struck one of the singers, the bass William Thomas, for leaving the platform on the wrong side, and he subsequently decided to step down from his conducting engagements for an unspecified length of time to undergo “therapy and counselling”. Even so, it always seemed unlikely that Gardiner would be able to continue to conduct the singers and instrumentalists with whom he had worked so closely for so long.
Yet Gardiner’s position at the forefront of the development of historically informed performance in Britain over the last 60 years is so significant that his split from the groups with whom he nurtured that development seems like a defining point in the whole evolution of the style, and the trigger perhaps for a real generational change.
In the 1960s as a student, Gardiner began to perform baroque music in a way that attempted to recreate the sound world that 17th and 18th-century composers would have expected. Such performances were still seen as experimental and very much a fringe activity; at that time Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Handel’s Water Music were still regularly performed by a full symphony orchestra playing on modern instruments. Nowadays, influenced in part by Gardiner’s dogged efforts, such repertoire has become primarily the territory of early-music groups such as the English Baroque Soloists.
The repertoire up to and including Mozart has been pretty comprehensively colonised by such specialist bands, but the core 19th-century symphonic repertoire, from Beethoven and Schubert to Bruckner and Mahler, proved harder to crack for period instrument enthusiasts. With the creation of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in 1989, though, Gardiner made his own effort to explore that repertoire, and together they went on to produce some exceptional performances, especially of Beethoven and Berlioz.
Some, perhaps understandably unable to separate what they experienced in Gardiner’s performances from the tales they had heard over many years about his apparent behaviour in rehearsal and the way in which he treated his singers and players – the behaviour that finally crossed the line last year with his confrontation with Thomas – found his musical approach hard driven and lacking in expressiveness. But at their best, Gardiner’s interpretations could be thrilling and theatrically alive, and in 2017 he provided a wonderful reminder of how magical those performances could be when he toured Europe with concert stagings of Monteverdi’s three operas to mark the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Whatever he was conducting, he never allowed historical, scholarly considerations to get in the way of making performance as vivid and communicative as possible.
Whether those qualities will ever be seen again on the concert platform remains to be seen. Gardiner has said that he intends to resume his career but with a “lighter, lower pressure schedule”. He has never exclusively confined himself to conducting his period-instrument bands; he had regular engagements each season with orchestras in the UK and on both sides of the Atlantic; in London he appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia, and also conducted opera at Covent Garden and elsewhere. It seems likely that when he does return to the podium as a guest it will first be with an orchestra outside Britain.
What the future holds for the choir and the two orchestras involved is harder to predict. In their early years both the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique were singular ensembles, but nowadays there is no shortage of first rate bands across Europe covering all historical periods, and the regular players and singers in Gardiner’s groups have also worked with other ensembles. Rather than the usual one size fits all approach that period-instrument groups still tend to adopt, perhaps these two ensembles might be reconstituted in more specialised ways, rather like the orchestra Les Siècles, which concentrates on French repertoire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
There are plenty of possibilities, but it remains to be seen how much of the brand was primarily Gardiner, and how much of a collective identity there was, though the concerts they have given since Gardiner stepped down, mostly under the Portuguese conductor Dinis Sousa, have generally been very warmly received, and there will always be a market for high-class performances.