On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Arte offers, throughout the day of Sunday April 30, three programs consisting of two concerts, recorded at the Salzburg Festival, in 2021, and on Radio France, in 2022, and a documentary by Natascha Pflaumbaum, John Eliot Gardiner: the art of conducting.
The please insert d'Arte announced that the conductor, known for his historically informed interpretations at the head of ensembles of period instruments, opened, on the occasion of this filmed portrait, the gates of Gore Farm, his organic farm in Dorset, some 200 kilometers from London, not far from the childhood home where he was raised by a cultured and music-loving family.
Founded by his great-uncle Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877-1950), composer, patron and farmer, this operation was taken over by Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), the father of John Eliot, known for his pioneering activities in the field of forestation and organic farming, then by his son. Unfortunately, this topic is not explored.
Controversial intellectual figure
And we would have liked to know more about Rolf Gardiner, a famous but controversial intellectual figure in England, in particular because of his links with Hitler's Germany, which he visited regularly until 1939 - without being a "Nazi". Britain", as scholars Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley recall in the book Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain. Ashgate, 2012, untranslated).
As for the musical subject, the documentary is of a rather remarkable platitude, not exempt from hagiographic remarks and naivety – and illustrated with a soundtrack of languid banality. The words of the conductor, although of great intelligence and great culture, are here also rather vague. Sir John definitely deserved better.
We will more readily refer to the two concerts on the menu for this special day, absolutely magnificent: at the Salzburg Festival 2021, Gardiner performed the incidental music written by Felix Mendelssohn for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, interspersed with extracts, in German, of the said play.
Reinvited for the second consecutive year by the Orchester philharmonique de Radio France, John Eliot Gardiner conducted there, in 2022, one of his chosen composers, Hector Berlioz, in a striking interpretation of Harold in Italy, with the French violist Antoine Tamestit as an instrumental "character", that of the "melancholy dreamer in the genre of Byron's Childe-Harold" described by Berlioz in his Memoirs.
