John Eliot Gardiner Celebrates Monteverdi's 450th Anniversary

Although Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) has long been recognized as the father of opera, only three of his contributions to the form survive. Next year marks the 450th anniversary of the Venetian master's birth, and to celebrate this musical milestone, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists have announced an ambitious international tour, with concert performances of all three operas - L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and L'incoronazione di Poppea - in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and the USA, between April and October of 2017. The tour will launch in Aix-en-Provence, where Gardiner - the winner of more Gramophone Awards than any other living artist - looks forward to leading Ulissefor the first time in his distinguished career. Additional European highlights include complete operatic trilogies in Paris and Bristol, as well as at the Berliner Festspiele, Lucerne Festival, and Venice's La Fenice, before the tour culminates with accounts of all three operas in multiple cities across America. In honor of the anniversary, Gardiner has been chosen to grace the cover of BBC Music early next year; as the magazine recently blogged: "It will be an exciting 2017, not just for music-lovers, but for Gardiner too, ... 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. Their rendition at DC's Kennedy Center last spring was hailed as "a wholly involving evening of drama and music at the highest level" (Washington Post), and at London's BBC Proms last summer, the Telegraph critic reported: "[Gardiner's] mastery seems effortless. ... A capacity audience was clearly enthralled, as I was."

The tour was announced during an intensive weeklong workshop, or "Accademia Monteverdiana," in Venice's glorious Fondazione Giorgio Cini, where Gardiner and his forces were joined by a number of leading Monteverdi scholars. Several of these academics will continue to work with the musicians over the course of the anniversary year, which also sees the ensembles return to Venice for a reprise of 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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