| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 25-Apr-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | Sir John Eliot Gardiner at 70 with the LSO and Stravinsky |
 There’s something quite strongly “neoclassical” about the whole historically-informed performance movement. Someone like Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has championed the use of detailed historical knowledge of performance practice and instruments, has never actually been attempting to transport us all back to the 18th century. That would be futile, obviously. Part of the aim has surely always been to let us hear the past with fresh ears, to give new context to music otherwise familiar – to make something new from something very old.Read full review... | |
| 19-Nov-2012 Segerstrom Center for the Arts: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall | John Eliot Gardiner enlightens with Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in Orange County |
 Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is an odd piece. Despite having a rich recorded legacy, it is not a piece that one encounters often in the concert hall. The technical challenges of this music are up there with virtually any other piece of combined music for choir and orchestra. As performed by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir last night, its difficulty was dispatched with an awe-inspiring fervor.Read full review... | |
| 16-Nov-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | John Eliot Gardiner's Beethoven 9 still shocks at Carnegie Hall |
 As I walked to this concert by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir, I wondered what might have changed in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Beethoven in the two decades since he first recorded these symphonies. In the early 1990s the period-instrument movement was at its height, and the shock of the new (in the guise of the old) drew dividing lines between those who insisted that Beethoven needed to be played with original instruments at the composer’s set speeds, and those who believed in the importance of tradition.Read full review... | |
| 31-Mar-2012 Meyerson Symphony Center | Music for Any Season: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Dallas |
 Christmas may have inspired much of the greatest holiday-related popular music, but in the Classical tradition, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (to say nothing of his St. John Passion and Easter Oratorio) points toward the influence of Easter. This piece, a gargantuan thing of beauty, was given three performances on the evenings leading up to Palm Sunday in Dallas, where the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Jaap van Zweden were joined by the Dallas Symphony Chorus and Children’s Chorus of Greater Dallas, directed respectively by Joshua Haberman and Cynthia Nott.Read full review... | |
