Sir John Eliot Gardiner's 7-Month Celebration of Monteverdi at 450 to Launch Next Week

On Monday (April 10), Sir John Eliot Gardiner Launches Seven-Month, 14-City "Monteverdi 450" World Tour with Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, and Cast of 18 International Soloists; Tour Concludes This October with Opera Trilogies in Chicago and New York.

Gardiner leads the soloists for Monteverdi 450 and members of the English Baroque Soloists in intensive weeklong Venice workshop (photo: James Cheadle) This year marks the 450th anniversary of the birth of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), long recognized as the father of opera. To celebrate this musical milestone, on Monday (April 10), Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists embark on an ambitious, seven-month international tour, presenting concert performances of all three of the Venetian master's surviving operas - L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and L'incoronazione di Poppea - in the UK, Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and the USA. The tour concludes this fall with complete operatic trilogies at Chicago's Harris Theater (Oct 12-15) and New York's Alice Tully Hall (Oct 18-21), in both of which venues celebrated American countertenor Reginald Mobley will sing Poppea's Arnalta and Venere. After launching in Aix-en-Provence, where Gardiner - the winner of more Gramophone Awards than any other living artist - leads Ulisse for the first time in his distinguished career, additional European tour highlights include complete trilogies at the Salzburg Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Lucerne Festival, Edinburgh Festival, and Venice's La Fenice, as well as in Bristol and Paris. In honor of the anniversary, Gardiner graces the cover of this month's BBC Music; as the magazine blogs, this is "an exciting 2017, not just for music-lovers, but for Gardiner, ... who continues to stretch the boundaries of early music."

Over the centuries since their creation, Monteverdi's operas have lost none of their power. Gardiner explains: "The full unchanging gamut of human emotions - bewildering, passionate, uncomfortable and sometimes uncontrollable - form the subtext of all of Monteverdi's surviving musical dramas. More often than not, he shows a deep empathy for his characters - including the less salubrious ones - just as his contemporary Shakespeare does. Both reveled in juxtaposing tragedy with lowlife comedy. Both men lived on the cusp of exciting, and dangerous, cultural worlds.

"By performing the trilogy in consecutive performances we hope to take audiences on a voyage - from the pastoral world to the court and the city, from myth to political history, from innocence to corruption, from a portrait of man subject to the whim of the gods, to a hero imprisoned by his human condition, and finally to a dual portrait of mad lovers, uncontrolled in their ambition and lust. Who is the true victor in the end? Perhaps the music." Although the conductor has yet to tackle Ulisse, he, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists have already made definitive Deutsche Grammophon recordings of both other operas. Starring Sylvia McNair, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Michael Chance, their 1996 Poppea was chosen for inclusion in the Penguin Guide to the 1,000 Finest Classical Recordings, while their 1987 L'Orfeo, with Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Anne Sofie von Otter, "is regarded as a benchmark achievement" (Guardian). More recently, Gardiner and the ensembles won similar accolades for L'Orfeo in live performance. In 2015, their rendition at DC's Kennedy Center was hailed as "a wholly involving evening of drama and music at the highest level" (Washington Post), and at London's BBC Proms, the Telegraph critic reported: "[Gardiner's] mastery seems effortless. ... A capacity audience was clearly enthralled, as I was."

To prepare for their upcoming tour, Gardiner and his forces undertook an intensive weeklong workshop, or "Accademia Monteverdiana," in Venice's glorious Fondazione Giorgio Cini, where they were joined by a number of leading Monteverdi scholars. Several of these academics are continuing to work with the musicians over the course of the anniversary year, which also sees the ensembles head to Cremona and St Denis, France, to reprise Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, the choral masterpiece for which Gardiner first founded the Monteverdi Choir more than half a century ago.

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