What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for his notorious rudeness to performers and colleagues. At one point in his marvellous new book on Bach he refers to the master ‘losing his rag with musicians’ (as a corrective to the ‘Godlike image’ of Bach that posterity has tended to prefer), and one senses a not entirely veiled sympathy: one struggling director excusing another, admittedly greater, but in that respect at least no different.
For while Gardiner doesn’t, as far as I know, compose, he has been and remains beyond question one of the most influential performing musicians of our time. The book’s first chapter chronicles his gradual emergence as a force in what we all blithely used to call Early Music: his distaste, as a Cambridge undergraduate, for the King’s College Willcocks style (Bach’s ‘Jesu meine Freude’ ‘sung in English with effete and lip-wiping prissiness’), his admiration for Thurston Dart’s ‘Sherlock Holmes-like approach to musicology’ and the ‘most un-English ardour’ of George Malcolm’s performances with the Westminster Cathedral choir.
His own significant conducting career began with Monteverdi’s Vespers, but gradually expanded in both directions, culminating (perhaps) in the great Bach cantata pilgrimage of 2000, but with many fascinating excursions besides. His ‘Pilgrimage to Santiago’ (medieval and Renaissance music) is one of the few CDs I can play and replay, and his LSO Barbican programme of Stravinsky’s Apollo and Oedipus Rex last spring quite simply set new standards of musical grasp and intelligence for the concert performance of those works.
Gardiner has never been a jetsetting allsorts conductor. You only have to read his insert notes for the Bach pilgrimage recordings to see that he is a musician who thinks long and hard about the works he intends to programme, researches text and context in great detail, but — and this is the crucial factor — knows how to convert knowledge into a profound sense of what makes the music work.
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