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.
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