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Proms 2010: John Eliot Gardiner interview
Ivan Hewett talks to the British conductor who epitomises “period performance”, ahead of his Proms concert.
Trust a Cambridge-trained historian to be a stickler for exactitude. At one point in my conversation with John Eliot Gardiner, I say he’s been a leading light in the performance of ’period’ music - meaning classical music before Mozart’s time - for a good forty years. “No, no,” he says with suppressed heat, “I’ve been a musician for 40 years. I’ve never thought of myself as a specialist, I’m just someone who loves to make music.”
That assertion would come as a surprise to many. If anyone epitomises “period performance”, the movement to ’scrape the varnish’ off older music by reviving obsolete instruments and long-vanished performing styles, it’s surely John Eliot Gardiner. He may not have been the first in the field, but his omnivorous curiosity, steely ambition and enterpreneurial energy have made him all-pervasive.
The evidence is everywhere in the converted barn he lives in the Dorset countryside, surrounded by his own woodlands and dairy cattle and wheatfields. An entire bookcase in his study is taken up with his 250 recordings, many of them made with his own performing groups, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. No stone in ’early music’ is left unturned; Schutz, Purcell, French Baroque composers such as Rameau and Charpentier, Bach, Handel, Gluck are all there.
Interestingly, what he really wants to show me is his collection of Berlioz’s letters, which have pride of place on the landing wall. He admits to being a ’total Berlioz nut’ and has laboured to recreate Berlioz’s strange, magical sound-world with his own Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. It’s a sign - one of many - that as the period performance movement’s ambitions have stretched ever wider, so have Gardiner’s own.
But it all began with Monteverdi, the man who broke free of the old, smooth vocal counterpoint of the Renaissance, and developed a new style, full of dancing energy and instrumental colour and unruly human emotion. “I was taken by my parents to hear a performance of his Vespers when I was 16,” says Eliot Gardiner, “and it just knocked me out. I’d never heard anything like it.” Was he a musical child? “Oh yes, there was always music going on in the house, and I used to sing at Bryanstone summer school. I can remember giving the first performance with my sister of Britten’s Friday Afternoons, with Britten listening at the back. I must have been eight or nine at the time.”
Gardiner went up to Cambridge to study history and Arabic, but became more and more convinced that music was his real destiny. “I conducted choirs a lot, and I couldn’t get the memory of Monteverdi Vespers out of my mind. I thought - wouldn’t it be wonderful to try and make it sound as it was meant to? That was real youthful folly, because the piece was hardly known. It was such a big job I had to persuade the university to let me take a year off. I did everything - I prepared my own edition of the music, found the players, booked the venue, raised the money.” Was he helped? “Oh God, I had so much advice. I remember Thurston Dart, a great scholar of old music, saying “Remember, young man, there’s no AH in Lau-DAH-te,” - it’s Lau-DA-te, with a bright Italian A sound.”
That performance in King’s College Chapel caused quite a stir. It was 1964, and Gardiner was only 21. Looking back, was it any good? “Not really,” he said. “I was a greenhorn, and the players on the cornett (a precursor of the trumpet, made from wood) really struggled. You’ve got to remember this was early days for HIP.” Early days for what? Gardiner gives a wry smile. “Sorry. I mean Historically Informed Performance.”
So we’re back to that thing which has really been the making of Gardiner, but which he now feels uncomfortable with. And yet isn’t it historical curiosity that drives him to revive this old music?
“Well, of course there is the thrill of research, but you have to remember what you find can always be interpreted in different ways. The danger is when different groups of people each think they’ve discovered the truth about something, which why HIP gets very cliquey and intolerant.”
Ironically, the piece that launched Eliot Gardiner’s career now has its own cliques. “When I started I was a trailblazer, but now everyone’s an expert on the Vespers,” says Eliot Gardiner, without rancour. “Some people say it’s not really a single work at all, others say that we’ve been singing certain movements at the wrong pitch. They have a point, but I think Monteverdi knew just what he was doing when he put small-scale pieces next to the grand settings of the Psalms. He was an opera composer after all, and loved dramatic contrast, and there are musical devices that bind the whole thing together. As for transposing some movements, that creates as many problems as it solves. That’s my view, but I’m sure other views are valid, as long as they’re convincing in performance. With great music there’s always more than one way to skin a cat.”
John Eliot Gardiner conducts Monterverdi’s Vespers at the BBC Proms on Sept 10. He also conducts the English Baroque Soloists in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on Saturday, and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra on Aug 29
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