With devotion – answered Sir John Eliot Gardiner when asked how he would approach Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, a work regarded as the Mount Everest of European music. He was saying nothing original in responding this way, given that the composer himself affixed the same performance instruction to the opening of his masterpiece, which he composed over a period of four years when already completely deaf. And yet, with this concise answer, the British conductor was also revealing his own approach t...o the music. This is important to stress as, over recent decades, Gardiner has reinterpreted numerous compositions of the musical repertoire that are now considered classics, thereby drawing accusations of sacrilege from many conservatives. Gardiner’s primary aim, however, has been to apply period performance practices with the objective of brushing away the cobwebs that early music has accumulated over centuries of tradition. For Gardiner, delving into the past is “in his blood” as his grandfather was one of the most important British Egyptologists of the early 20th century. The 69-year-old conductor does not, however, strive to merely reconstruct the first performance of a work: in the case of Beethoven’s greatest later works, such as the Symphony No. 9 and the Missa solemnis, there would be little point in doing so given that both works suffered catastrophic original premières. It was only in the decades after Beethoven’s death that musicians were able to meet the technical and musical demands imposed by the composer’s latter works. Whatever the approach, Gardiner’s interpretation of the Missa solemnis promises to be extraordinarily exciting: a rigorous confrontation with one of the truly monumental works in the history of Western classical music, to be performed by the Monteverdi Choir, which Gardiner founded when still at university, in collaboration with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, which he established in 1990.
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