John Eliot Gardiner, Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists Make Princeton Debut in Only U.S. Appearance of Choir's 50th Anniversary Season on 6/15

On Sunday, June 15, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists make their Princeton debut with a performance at Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University that marks their only U.S. engagement of the season. To celebrate the choir's 50th anniversary, their program comprises a trio of Baroque sacred choral masterpieces: Bach's cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden and motet for double choir Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, and Handel's early psalm setting Dixit Dominus. The concert is presented in joint partnership between Princeton University Art Museum and philanthropists William and Judith Scheide. William Scheide is the centenarian Bach scholar who currently owns Elias Haussmann's famous 1748 Bach portrait. The painting formerly hung in the Gardiner family home, as the conductor so eloquently recounts in Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven; published by Knopf this past fall, Gardiner's biography was named a 2013 Book of the Year by both The Economist and the Wall Street Journal.

Highlighting a tour that also includes stops in London, Aldeburgh, Paris, Versailles, Strasbourg, Santander, San Sebastian, Pisa, Cologne, Vienna, and Salzburg, the upcoming U.S. appearance is timed to coincide with the Monteverdi Choir's release of Vigilate! on their own label, Soli Deo Gloria (SDG). Bringing together the polyphonic mastery of Byrd, Tallis, Morley, Philips, White and Tomkins - composers who were all recusants, or undercover Catholics, in post-Reformation England - the album is due for digital release on May 27 and will be available on CD from July 8.

These events crown an historic season for Gardiner and his ensembles. Besides the publication of Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (see excerpts from reviews below), 2013-14 saw the launch of the Monteverdi Choir's 50th anniversary celebrations with a gala concert and dinner at Buckingham Palace, hosted by the Prince of Wales. It was Gardiner, who describes their past half-century together as "a tremendous collective adventure," who founded the choir in order to sing Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers in a seminal 1964 performance that they recreated together this spring - 50 years later to the day - at King's College, Cambridge. The concert scored five-star reviews in both the Financial Times and The Times of London, which observed:

The season also brought two major releases on the SDG label. Beethoven's monumental Missa solemnis was, under Gardiner's leadership, "performed to perfection and brought into new, terrifying life" (The Times, UK) by the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Likewise Bach's complete cantatas - recorded live by Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists during their Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, hailed as "one of the most ambitious musical projects of all time" (Gramophone magazine) - were issued together for the first time as a limited edited boxed set. Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir received Gramophone's 2013 Baroque Vocal Classical Music Award for their SDG recording of Bach motets, and the conductor remains the musician to have received the most Gramophone Awards to date.

Equally renowned for his scholarship, Gardiner began his tenure as President of the Leipzig Bach-Archiv Foundation in January.

For ticket information: www.scheideconcerts.com.

For more information, visit www.monteverdi.co.uk/about/gardiner.

To post a comment, you must register and login.