Biography of John Eliot Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner is one of the leading conductors in the active "authentic performances" movement in England, performing Baroque music but also extending his range into later repertoire. He first conducted at the age of 15, and after finishing school he studied at King's College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate, he conducted the combined Oxford and Cambridge Singers on a 1964 tour of the Middle East and founded the Monteverdi Choir, which has consistently performed on his recordings since.After graduation, he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and then studied as a postgraduate at King's College, London, with early music leader Thurston Dart. His first notable engagement as a conductor was at a Promenade Concert in London in 1969 and he first conducted an opera in London (Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride) at Covent Garden in 1973.He had continued conducting the Monteverdi Choir, then founded the English Baroque Soloists, specializing in Baroque music played on original-style instruments. The EBS first appeared at the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and has appeared with the Monteverdi Choir on many recordings.He made his American debut in 1979 leading the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, part of an active and often overlooked aspect of his career: conducting standard repertoire on modern instruments. This included a period as principal conductor (1980-1983) of the CBC Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; music director of the Opera de Lyon (1983-1988), which included founding an entirely new orchestra; and principal conductor of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg (1991-1994). He expanded his activities in the original-style instruments movement by recognizing that from the Classical era and well into the Romantic age there were distinctly different instrument designs than those that are standard today. As a result, he founded another new orchestra, the Orchéstre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, to specialize in that period with authentic instruments.He has also been an active guest conductor, leading major orchestras of the world, including the Cleveland, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, and Philharmonia orchestras, and has conducted the Puccini opera Manon Lescaut at Glyndebourne. He led a cycle of all seven mature Mozart operas and has conducted over 250 recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Erato labels. He and Herbert von Karajan share the record for the most Gramophone Awards in a single year (three), while Gardiner has won more of them over the years than any other artist.

Biography of Charlotte Margiono

No biography available

Biography of English Baroque Soloists

Although the English Baroque Soloists was officially established as a chamber ensemble of period instruments in 1978, the group actually gave its first concert at the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music in a performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea. Founded by John Eliot Gardiner, the group regularly performs throughout England and Europe. It has given a number of concerts in two London halls, the Barbican and St. John's Smith Square. The English Baroque Soloists drew many of their original members from another group Gardiner had founded (in 1968), the Monteverdi Orchestra. Shortly after their founding, it was Bach and Handel who were largely the focus of the EBS. However, the EBS became closely associated with Mozart's music, mainly because of its numerous, generally highly acclaimed recordings of his works. In 1984, Gardiner and the EBS launched a series for the label Archiv Produktion devoted to Mozart's concertos for piano and orchestra with soloist Malcolm Bilson (using a fortepiano) and the first such cycle using period instruments. Two years later, with the concerto series ongoing, they launched another Mozart project, this one to cover the mature symphonies for Philips. In summer 1990, the EBS debuted at the Salzburg Festival, giving three concerts, all to critical acclaim. The group has since returned numerous times and has also subsequently toured Vienna and Innsbruck. With the release in 1990 of Piano Concerto No. 24 (K. 491) and No. 27 (K. 595), the piano concerto series was completed, but the EBS and Gardiner immediately set to work recording the seven mature operas of Mozart for Archiv Produktion. The first release in this cycle, Idomeneo, won Gramophone's Best Opera Award in 1991. In that same year. Gardiner, the EBS, and the Monteverdi Choir appeared in a live BBC television broadcast of Mozart's Requiem performed at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The last issue in the Gardiner/EBS Mozart operas series, Die Zauberflöte, was released in 1996, after which they turned to the music of Bach. In the late 1990s, a new series of recordings began with the release in 2000 of Bach's Cantatas No. 6 "Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend" (BWV 6) and No. 66, "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen" (BWV 66). Along with the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner and the EBS performed the entire cycle of 198 Bach cantatas throughout various European churches in 2000. But the EBS was hardly focusing on only Mozart or Bach in the 1990s: its performance at Covent Garden in 1995 of Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation) was enthusiastically received and led to a successful 1997 recording on Archiv Produktion. Also in 1995, the EBS and the Monteverdi Choir performed the music for the film England, My England, a highly acclaimed movie directed by Tony Palmer, about English composer Henry Purcell. That same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and Monteverdi Choir issued a multi-disc set on the label Erato devoted to Purcell's music. The touring schedule of the EBS has been one of the busiest of any orchestra's. In 2002, for example, it included performances of Weber's Oberon in Paris and London; of sixteenth and seventeenth century church music in numerous cities throughout the U.K.; Bach cantatas in Utrecht, Köthen, and Wiesbaden; and numerous other performances in Brussels, Zurich, Baden-Baden, Vienna, Turin, and Athens. By 2002, the EBS appeared on about 70 recordings, making it one of the most heavily recorded orchestras over the years since its founding.

Biography of Alison Bury

No biography available

Biography of Julian Clarkson

No biography available

Biography of Eirian James

No biography available

Biography of Christoph Pregardien

Tenor Christoph Prégardien began his musical education at the Limburg Cathedral Choir School. He went on to study at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule with Martin Gründeler, and later with Carla Castellani in Milan, Karlheinz Jarius in Frankfurt, and Alois Treml in Stuttgart.Prégardien has built up a major reputation as a concert artist, performing the oratorios and Passions of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. His repertoire also encompasses the works of seventeenth century composers Monteverdi, Schütz, and Purcell, and twentieth century composers Britten, Stravinsky, Killmayer, and Rihm. Among the conductors he has performed and recorded with are Brüggen, Gardiner, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Hogwood, Jacobs, Koopman, Kuijken, Leonhardt, and Rilling. As an operatic tenor, he has given performances in many major venues, among them London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Montpellier, and Tokyo. His roles have included such characters as Monterverdi's Ulisse, Mozart's Tamino and Don Ottavio, and Rossini's Count Almaviva.His special love is lieder, which he studied at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule in classes with Hartmut Höll. After the great success of his first lieder recordings he embarked on a major recording career. His outstanding achievements as lieder singer have been acknowledged by numerous awards, such as the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Edison Award, Diapason D'or de l'année and the Cannes Classical Award, among others. Prégardien and Andreas Staier have performed together internationally since 1991, and in 1997 they signed an exclusive contract with Teldec. Their début CD for the label, Schubert's Winterreise, won numerous awards including the Caecilia Prize, the Edison Award, a Diapason d'Or, and a Choc du Monde de la Musique, as well as being chosen for the German Record Critics' Quarterly List. His other favorite piano partner is Michael Gees. Other releases by Prégardien have included a CD of songs by Beethoven and his contemporaries Nikolaus von Krufft and Franz Lachner, and Brahms' Die schöne Magelone.

Biography of David Watkin

David Watkin is one of the leading cellists in the period performance movement in London. As a boy he had thorough training in the cello including private lessons with Sharon McKinley and school lessons with Margaret Moncrieff and Amaryllis Fleming. He attended St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, as a choral scholar. This meant that he was an adult-voice member of the College's chapel choir and received thorough training in voice and interpretation and a scholarship to the college for singing daily services during the school term. While there, he also won an award for his cello playing. As a Cambridge student he studied with the great teacher William Pleeth.He played his debut recital in 1989 at St. John's, Smith Square. His accompanist was Howard Moody, who before and since has been Watkin's duo performance partner. They had already been friends for ten years, meeting in 1979 when they were both members of the National Youth Orchestra in Britain.Watkin believes in informing his music making with scholarship, and does considerable research into the history and performing practice of the music he plays. This has naturally led him into the "period" or "authentic" performance movement. He has appeared as a soloist with many of London's period instrument orchestras. His performance of Vivaldi cello sonatas on the Hyperion label won the highest possible rating in BBC Music Magazine. He has recorded with the English Concert, the Academy of Ancient Music, Collegium Musicum '90, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. One of his achievements was the thorough researching of the method used in the Baroque era by cellists in realizing figured bass, a practice more usually associated with keyboard players. After writing an article on the practice in Early Music magazine, he became the first cellist in the modern era to give a complete concert realizing figured bass, playing Corelli's Op. 5 Violin Sonatas, which he recorded on the Novalis label. (His partners in this endeavor were the Trio Veracini.)Watkin was principal cello in three leading period ensembles, the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, and L'Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. It may have been membership in the later that stimulated his interest in researching performance practice of the nineteenth century.While commentators have long realized that there were striking technological and interpretational changes from the Classical era to the Romantic era (a period generally exemplified by the career of Beethoven), Watkin came to accept that there had been an equally abrupt change about a century later. For instance, the eminent teacher Leopold Auer felt it necessary in 1919 to write an article urging violinists not to adopt the practice of Auer's most famous pupil, Jascha Heifetz, in using vibrato constantly. Vibrato, advocated Auer (doubtless reflecting the established earlier practice), was meant to be applied sparingly for expressive purposes. Watkin discovered also that the use of portamento (glides from one note to another on the same finger) was commonplace, and was documented in published performers' editions of Romantic music giving fingerings. Using such research he published an article on the performance of Beethoven Cello Sonatas and then recorded them in a highly acclaimed and radical performance. Gramophone Magazine wrote of it, "If you're not sure about the advantages of original-instrument performance of classical chamber music, try this disc!" In 1999, he joined the Eroica Quartet, which shared his interest in "performing the music of the Romantic period and rediscovering the style of its performance." He has written the Eroica Quartet's official mission statement, and with them, has recorded discs devoted to quartets of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Robert Schumann.

Biography of Steve Smith

No biography available