The English Baroque Soloists made their opera debut with him in the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, performing Handel's Acis and Galatea on period instruments. Four years later, in 1973, he made his first appearance at the Covent Garden conducting Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. In 1969 Gardiner made his opera debut with a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute at the English National Opera. Upon changing from modern instruments to period instruments in 1977, the orchestra changed its name to the English Baroque Soloists in 1978. In 1968 he founded the Monteverdi Orchestra. Returning to England, Gardiner joined the BBC Northern Orchestra as an apprentice conductor. After graduating in history, Gardiner continued his musical studies at King's College London under Thurston Dart and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, whose music had been a very early influence. Whilst at Cambridge, he conducted the Oxford and Cambridge Singers on a concert tour of the Middle East. This either featured or led to the foundation of the Monteverdi Choir, with which he made his London conducting debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1966. While an undergraduate at Cambridge he launched his career as a conductor with a performance of Vespro della Beata Vergine by Monteverdi, in King's College Chapel on 5 March 1964. Bach, which was in Gardiner's childhood home

He was educated at Bryanston School, then studied history at King's College, Cambridge, where his tutor was the social anthropologist Edmund Leach. A self-taught musician who also played the violin, he began to study conducting at the age of 15. Bach, which had been lent to his parents for safe keeping during the Second World War. As a child he grew up with the celebrated Haussmann portrait of J.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE HonFBA (born 20 April 1943) is an English conductor, particularly known for his performances of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage of 2000, performing Bach's church cantatas in liturgical order in churches all over Europe, and New York City, with the Monteverdi Choir, and recording them at the locations.īorn in Fontmell Magna, Dorset, son of Rolf Gardiner and Marabel Hodgkin, Gardiner's early musical experience came largely through singing with his family and in a local church choir.

Gardiner music in the castle of heaven