Touring Maestro’s Style Still Evolving

“I found it very hard to leave home this morning” is John Eliot Gardiner’s first comment upon arrival in the United States. The English conductor, here leading the Monteverdi Choir’s 25th anniversary world tour (which reaches Ambassador Auditorium tonight) has left behind in London his wife, Elizabeth Wilcock, and three daughters, one only 6 days old.

“We end March 16 (in Delhi, India), and that is quite as long as I care to be away just now,” says Gardiner. Wilcock, concertmistress of the English Baroque Soloists (EBS), the instrumental ensemble accompanying the choir, is sitting this tour out.

Founder, artistic director and conductor of both choir and EBS, Gardiner was at first considered a maverick in some circles. The period performance practice he has developed with the choir and instrumentalists over the last quarter-century (EBS supplanted his original Monteverdi Orchestra in 1978, but with many of the same musicians) is ever-evolving, not “set in concrete.”

Gardiner has been as busy in the recording studio as in the concert hall, with a discography now numbering more than 100 recordings. Although he didn’t win a Grammy award this week (the Monteverdi Choir/EBS recording of Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” was a nominee), he doesn’t keep count of such awards (he’s won five, in fact).

“It’s not false modesty, just that the record companies aren’t very good about keeping one informed of that sort of thing.”

Handel’s “Israel in Egypt,” Gardiner and company’s offering in Pasadena, “is a glorious work,” Gardiner says. “I’ve always loved it. Handel’s strong sense of theater absolutely shines through, not to mention that it is an excellent affirmation of his faith--not merely Christian, you know, but with a great deal of humanism built in. The work is marvelously graphic. Each event, apparition, plague. What a sense of ritual, what a sense of wit! Wit in music is very rare, really. The frogs, the hailstones, the passage ‘The Lord is a Man of War,’ the description of the Egyptians sinking as a stone. You can hear the weight sinking to the bottom, coming to rest in the mud.”

Gardiner eschews both the antiseptic, sterile approach to this music that often goes unquestioned as being “authentically” Baroque, and the amiable, stately mushy oratorio style of mid-20th Century English choral societies.

“It’s an exhilarating work to conduct, to play, and for the chorus to sing. I hope we’ll have the impact here we’ve had with it in the past. That will feed us and help us to continue.”

And what of purists and self-appointed keepers of the “right way?”

“Oh, they’ll be horrified!” he says, loving it. “But I’m not a provocateur. Authenticity is awfully difficult to authenticate, if you will. Music must sound immediate, as if just written, not distant or static or unapproachable.”

Gardiner isn’t delighted with being regarded as exclusively a Baroque specialist. Former music director of the Opera at Lyons, he is still principal conductor there, and says: “Of course I cherish 19th-Century music! I’ve actually got a sort of great urge to get on with it and to tackle it in new ways, or ways that may seem new now.”

To this end, he has formed an orchestra in Paris, L’Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.

“We’re hoping we can open in December. All (government) funds have been delayed. The whole business of running a musical outfit in France is something of a nightmare.”

The role of barnacle-scrubber fires him up: “There are so many accumulated, or false, performance traditions, reinterpretations that don’t conform to ways the composer heard things in his own head. Individual colors and voices get all blurred in the ‘traditional’ manner of playing 19th-Century works.”

The conductor’s sanctum sanctorum is a farm in Dorset. “I’m going there directly the tour ends and not budging for three weeks, but for an overnight run to check things out in Venice (where the group records Monteverdi’s 1610 “Vespers” at St. Mark’s in May). We start lambing on the 20th, and I’m there in August for harvest. Life in this career with only London (to live in) would be unthinkable, though,” he allows. “Music is a profound restorative.”