Gardiner’s performances have plenty of style whether or not he uses period instruments The set also includes three Gramophone Award winners: Handel’s Dixit Dominus (1978) and L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1980), and Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus (1988). Sixty-four discs from 1976 to 1990 – and one outlier from 1995 (‘England, my England’: music from the soundtrack to Tony Palmer’s film about the story of Henry Purcell) – are testament to an extraordinarily impressive musical appetite and insatiable curiosity, and all this while he was also recording for DG Archiv Produktion (among others). Both points are amply reflected in this handsome box-set of Gardiner’s complete Erato recordings, which span a period of rapid growth in his recording activities throughout the 1980s. What feels like a very short decade ago, James Jolly celebrated Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s 70th birthday in this magazine and reflected that Gardiner was ‘the first conductor to follow a very modern trajectory’, also noting that ‘the alignment of Gardiner’s career with the Golden Years of the recording industry allowed him to record extensively’.
0 kommentar(er)
