It comes as little surprise after the events of last summer that John Eliot Gardiner has formally severed all links with the three pioneering ensembles that he established, the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Gardiner apologised and publicly stated remorse over the incident after a performance of Berlioz’s Les Troyens in August last year, when allegedly he struck one of the singers, the bass William Thomas, for leaving the platform on the wrong side, and he subsequently decided to step down from his conducting engagements for an unspecified length of time to undergo “therapy and counselling”. Even so, it always seemed unlikely that Gardiner would be able to continue to conduct the singers and instrumentalists with whom he had worked so closely for so long.
Yet Gardiner’s position at the forefront of the development of historically informed performance in Britain over the last 60 years is so significant that his split from the groups with whom he nurtured that development seems like a defining point in the whole evolution of the style, and the trigger perhaps for a real generational change.
