Revolutionary, romantic maestro

After Gardiner: the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique perform Beethoven's nine symphonies

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‘Incandescence’: Dinis Sousa conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in Beethoven’s nine symphonies Picture © Paul Marc Mitchell

John Eliot Gardiner was the spectre hovering over the feast that was the most recent cycle of Beethoven symphonies given by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (ORR) at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

The pioneering conductor founded the ORR in 1989 as a ‘Romantic’ development of the English Baroque Soloists (his first period instrument ensemble), and one of their earliest projects was a recording of Beethoven’s symphonic output. It wasn’t the first to use historical instruments, but it proved a landmark, marking the debut of Jonathan Del Mar’s now standard Bärenreiter edition of Beethoven’s scores was heard on disc. 

This 2024 Beethoven project - five concerts in London and four in Paris - was evidently designed as a Gardiner gig. But the 81-year old conductor’s career was ‘interrupted’ after a fisticuffs altercation with one of his singers at the curtain-call for his performance of Berlioz’s epic Les Troyens last August at La Côte-Saint-André, the composer’s birthplace.

It remains unclear what future, if any, Gardiner has with the Monteverdi Choir and its associate orchestras, as the group have yet to announce their 2024/2025 season: the only reference to Gardiner on the orchestra’s website dates back to February 2024, when both conductor and the Monteverdi board expressed their hope that Gardiner would return to the concert podium “later this year”. So far, no such return has been announced, and, tellingly, the London Symphony Orchestra, where Gardiner has been a long-standing guest, has no concerts to be conducted by him advertised for the 2024/2025 season. In the current societal atmosphere, where bullying has brought down lesser men, it’s hard to imagine a comeback at his age.