Trumpety Splendour for Christmas

Rousset conducts the Monteverdi Choir in Charpentier & Bach

St Martin-in-the-Fields, the London home of the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists Picture © Mark Allan

It has been a tricky year for the Monteverdi Choir. No sooner had it severed links with John Eliot Gardiner, its founder-conductor, following last year’s widely reported assault on one of its singers, than he announced the formation of a rival ensemble which would perform exactly the same programme originally planned for him by the Monteverdi Choir.

Within the music profession Gardiner has long had a reputation for bullying and rudeness. After what should have been a career-ending incident during last year’s Monteverdi Choir tour of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, he agreed to take time off for “reflection” on his behaviour. It now looks as if he treated this ‘time off’ merely as a sabbatical, in the hope that his misdemeanour would be conveniently forgotten.

The timing of his competing tour with the newly-formed Constellation Choir and Orchestra suggests that the leopard has not changed his spots. There was consternation in Hamburg, for example, when it became clear that Gardiner’s new outfit would gazump by a fortnight the Monteverdi Choir’s concert there with leading French baroque specialist Christophe Rousset. In the end only four Monteverdi dates went ahead, and as a result the tour is likely to have lost money. That Gardiner thinks his already dented reputation is somehow enhanced by such spoiler tactics is fairly shocking.