Marten Root, a flutist specializing in historical instruments, has played under the conductor John Eliot Gardiner for over 35 years, and considers him a profoundly intelligent and honest musician.
Root, 68, has also had severe enough verbal disagreements with Gardiner, 81, that he twice temporarily quit working with him. The reasons were “incidents which happen if you’re a flute player in an orchestra,” Root said in a video interview. “You’re the top of the score. You’re always in the line of fire.”
Both times, he returned. Playing under Gardiner, an eminent performer of Baroque music who has recorded every single Bach cantata, was “no easy job to do,” Root said, “but basically, I decided to go back to the orchestra twice, because it’s musically more than worth it.”
In August last year, Gardiner struck the singer William Thomas following a performance of the opera “Les Troyens” in France. Gardiner apologized and announced that he was temporarily withdrawing from all conducting.
Now, Gardiner has returned — but not with his old organization, Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, which didn’t want him back. Instead, Gardiner has just completed a tour with a new ensemble he founded, the Constellation Choir & Orchestra.
The two groups almost collided recently, playing nearly identical concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, on Dec. 7 and 14. Heard so closely together, the performances offered an unusual glimpse of what’s ahead for Gardiner’s once and future ensembles. Although the concerts looked similar on paper, they sounded strikingly different.
Gardiner’s collaborators remain some of his fiercest defenders. “Let’s face it, nice guys don’t win ball games,” Root said. The mezzo-soprano Alice Coote told The Times of London that Gardiner had struggled through the five-hour performance of “Les Troyens” in sweltering heat and had been “angered” when he didn’t receive a standing ovation.
Away from the podium, he underwent cognitive behavioral therapy and took anger management classes. “My whole life, I tried to understand and get a grip on anger — and I was completely shocked by what I did,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung recently. (Gardiner did not respond to an interview request.)
In July, Gardiner returned to performance, leading the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a concert of pieces by Von Weber, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. A short time later, the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, an umbrella organization that includes the English Baroque Soloists, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir — all groups founded by Gardiner — decided not to invite him back.
“The M.C.O takes seriously its obligations to protect victims of abuse and assault, and preventing any recurrence remains a priority for the organization,” the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras said in a statement.
Musicians like Root were frustrated by the decision, seeing Gardiner as a singular artist who has taken sincere, specific steps to improve his behavior after a mistake. Classical music commentators, though, identified a familiar dynamic in which eminent conductors are held to a more forgiving standard of behavior than leaders in other fields. Gardiner’s quick return to performance, the journalist Andrew Mellor wrote in the trade publication Classical Music, “is a damning indictment of our industry’s unwillingness to change.”
When Gardiner founded the Constellation Choir & Orchestra in September, many performers from his old groups were happy to follow him. The oboist Michael Niesemann, 64, has played under Gardiner for 32 years, including in the new ensemble, and said in a phone interview, “Plainly and simply, we want to continue to try to bring light into the world with the music.”
The German soprano Marie Luise Werneburg, 40, who recently made her debut under Gardiner, said that the first rehearsals after his break were friendly yet exacting. Gardiner commented on some drawings Werneburg’s children had made in her score. “That created a totally kind and relaxed atmosphere,” she said in a phone interview.
Given the speed with which Gardiner launched Constellation, and the ensuing split from the Monteverdi organization, some awkwardness was inevitable. When Gardiner hit Thomas, the visit to the Elbphilharmonie this month by the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir was already scheduled. Promoters were faced with a choice to book the famous conductor with his new ensemble, or the organization he built over decades, led by Christophe Rousset, the harpsichordist and respected guest conductor for this tour. Only the Elbphilharmonie decided to invite both.
Arrangements for the dueling tours recalled a family trying to salvage a nonrefundable vacation booked before a messy divorce. In an interview, Christoph Lieben-Seutter, the general and artistic director of the Elbphilharmonie, said that he scheduled the back-to-back performances because he didn’t want to deny performers work.
“I think it was a generous solution,” he said, “for both the musicians and the audience.”
The Dec. 7 concert was the Constellation Orchestra & Choir’s debut. Because of a delayed flight, the performance started 40 minutes late, and in the first piece, Bach’s cantata “Schwingt freudig euch empor,” the group sounded like it was still adjusting to the hall’s acoustic, with a thin ensemble sound and muddy attacks.
They quickly found their footing, however. Their performances of Charpentier’s “Messe de Minuit pour Noël” and Bach’s “Unser Mund sei voll Lachens” showed excellent balance and moments of dynamic daring. The Bach aria “Auch mit gedämpften, schwachen Stimmen,” which Werneburg sung accompanied by the solo violinist Madeleine Easton, was stunningly soft and tender.
Gardiner’s interpretations emphasized continuity of line, and he made sure that individual accents or ornaments didn’t overwhelm larger musical phrases. But his approach neglected the gestural, almost linguistic aspects of the Baroque repertoire that give the music such topographic variety.
In the Dec. 14 performance, by Gardiner’s old ensembles and Rousset, the same music was enlivened by a broader palette of articulations, including pungent, non-vibrato long notes, fleet-footed short notes and assertive accents. The strings created a beautifully earthy sound, though their enthusiasm made it hard to hear soft instruments like the theorbo. Passages of ornamentation sounded spontaneous and tasteful; the group’s excellent articulation extended to the singers’ clear renditions of the words.
The concerts offered strong and overlapping pleasures. Rousset’s was more sharply etched, but the Constellation Orchestra & Choir offered a thrill beyond the music: the chance for the audience to witness Gardiner’s redemption arc. Of the two conductors, he received the more rapturous reception.
In a brief speech in German before his encore, he noted that his time away from music had been hard. “We must pass through great sadness to reach the kingdom of God,” he said, nodding to a Bach cantata, and added that the concert felt like the beginning of a new chapter. The musicians beamed. This time, the audience gave him a standing ovation.
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