What feels like a very short decade ago, James Jolly celebrated Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s 70th birthday in this magazine and reflected that Gardiner was ‘the first conductor to follow a very modern trajectory’, also noting that ‘the alignment of Gardiner’s career with the Golden Years of the recording industry allowed him to record extensively’. Both points are amply reflected in this handsome box-set of Gardiner’s complete Erato recordings, which span a period of rapid growth in his recording activities throughout the 1980s. Sixty-four discs from 1976 to 1990 – and one outlier from 1995 (‘England, my England’: music from the soundtrack to Tony Palmer’s film about the story of Henry Purcell) – are testament to an extraordinarily impressive musical appetite and insatiable curiosity, and all this while he was also recording for DG Archiv Produktion (among others). The set also includes three Gramophone Award winners: Handel’s Dixit Dominus (1978) and L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1980), and Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus (1988).

The Monteverdi Choir and Monteverdi Orchestra were, of course, long established by the start of this relationship with Erato, but among the unique moments captured by this collection are the beginning of the English Baroque Soloists, the period-instrument ensemble founded in 1978, and the five years (1983‑88) when Gardiner was music director of the Opéra National de Lyon, where he founded an entirely new orchestra. He produced a particularly astounding account of Chabrier’s L’étoile in 1984, when the Lyon orchestra was just a year old, and there followed several more treasures from the French repertoire. Throughout this collection the Monteverdi Choir are a unifying presence, collaborating with all three orchestras. Theirs is a choral rather than consort sound, characterised by a superbly clear sense of line and reliably warm tone. Talking to Alan Blyth for Gramophone in 1975, Gardiner reflected: ‘My ideas about Monteverdi developed really out of a reaction to the preciosity of King’s [College Choir, Cambridge]. I saw their musical abilities but realised they were buried in 19th-century tradition. I felt it was a challenge to create a choir that could sound more Mediterranean, hence the Monteverdi [Choir] was formed.’

Yet Gardiner’s Erato relationship stops short of his next big project: the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, founded in 1989. Erato may not have recorded this group but you can feel Gardiner’s appetite for Romantic music already brewing in these Erato years, particularly with his fine accounts of Schubert and Bizet symphonies with the Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon. I wonder whether Gardiner was one of the main people to cross Laurence Dreyfus’s mind back in 1984 when he memorably described the early music movement in The Musical Quarterly as ‘casting a covetous glance at the 19th century’.

Many but by no means all of the discs in this set fall into the once clearly defined early music category of works pre-1750, and some overspill at a time when even the Classical period was contested territory. To use period instruments was once in itself a statement of protest and Robert Layton’s now infamous remark about late Haydn and Mozart in this magazine – ‘in so many instances the strings of authentic ensembles sound about as beautiful as period dentistry’ (5/81) – summed up the strength of partisanship in the early ’80s. But while some conductors took sides and became entrenched in one camp or the other, Gardiner continued to work with both modern and period players with huge success, his musical appetite seemingly inspired rather than daunted by historical musicology, and his strings always highly polished.

Talking to Carolyn Nott in Gramophone (5/79), Gardiner explained his then pragmatic approach to period instruments: at one point in the late ’70s he chose not to use them for a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in Westminster Cathedral because ‘a small-scale baroque group would have been totally lost in such a vast auditorium’. It’s this sort of comment that I admire, because historically informed performance is as much about a sense of style as it is the sonority of period instruments or careful editorial work, and Gardiner’s performances have plenty of style whether or not he uses period instruments. Take, for instance, a pair of albums lying either side of his crossover point: that Award-winning Handel Dixit Dominus (3/78) with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra is a vivid – and I would argue dramatic – performance of the composer’s youthful work; a recording that has lost little of its impact over some 45 years. Oddly enough it is the modern strings of the Monteverdi Orchestra that can sound most dated – at moments such as the opening of ‘Tecum principium in die virtutis’, for example – and once or twice I find the soloists’ approach a little staunch. The clarity of the opening chorus, though, is superb (as is the chorus about judging nations, ‘Judicabit in nationibus’, with its cruel, shaking laughter depicted in ‘conquassa‑a‑a‑a‑bit’). Certainly, this stylish and committed modern-instrument performance set the scene for the cut and thrust of later, faster recordings on period instruments such as Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir and Players over a decade later (EMI Reflexe, 6/89).

Now turn to Bach’s youthful Cantata No 4, Christ lag in Todesbanden, recorded just three years later with the recently formed period-instrument English Baroque Soloists. It still has Gardiner’s trademark precision in all parts, but without any hint of reticence it’s steeped in a rich, warm melancholy that Nicholas Anderson referred to as ‘pervasive sadness’ (11/82). This, for me, is an important disc, a reminder that period-instrument performance doesn’t automatically mean fast tempos. Here, more than ever, the pull-quote that adorns the side of this new packaging seems so apt: ‘My love for baroque music has never been exclusive. Of course, I am attracted by period instruments, but that has never been an end in itself. For me, it is simply a matter of always moving further towards the truth, towards a fresh interpretation.’

Both recordings hail from a fertile patch in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when the Erato relationship was in its infancy. Notable particularly is a keen sense of Handelian drama, which led Roger Fiske to comment on some vivid frogs in Israel in Egypt (1/80), which ‘never jumped more realistically’. He also drew direct comparison with Simon Preston on Argo (4/76), who deployed boy trebles, going as far as to doubt ‘if Handel would have ever have wanted boys again if he could have heard Gardiner’s singers’.

A career of fine performances of Bach and Handel would be sufficient to secure a memorial in the early music pantheon but Gardiner, in these Erato years, was also trailblazing for Rameau, and especially Les Boréades. Having found an original manuscript in Paris in the early ’70s, he immediately recognised its genius and worked on his own transcription. In his 1979 conversation with Carolyn Nott he remarked on the cramped nature of Rameau’s handwriting, observing sympathetically that it seemed to suffer from ‘a sort of Parkinson’s wobble’ (you and me both, Jean-Philippe!) but he also spotted that it contained rehearsal markings for the Paris Opéra as well as scribbled messages between composer and copyist. His resulting recording (10/83) followed acclaimed performances in Bruges and London. I still vividly remember first hearing the beautiful sound of the contredanse en rondeau from Act 1, so calm, so confident and so graceful. It is perhaps this assured sense of style that has allowed it to fare so well with age.

From the late ’70s, when Thomas Allen and John Tomlinson sang Purcell, to the late ’80s, when Lynne Dawson sang Gluck and Diana Montague sang Berlioz, Gardiner has always had a fine ear for his vocal soloists. I’m particularly glad that this Erato set includes Anne Sofie von Otter, Brigitte Fournier and Barbara Hendricks in Berlioz’s 1866 revision of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (2/90) – the perfect project to celebrate the many talents of Gardiner and his remarkable musicians. Yet it is my bête noire that such a sumptuous collection does not carry, or link to, original booklet notes: in this case it is particularly frustrating not to have listings of all the original parts that Berlioz cut and which this recording restored – although a glance through our Gramophone reviews archive will certainly help.

The reissued CDs are each presented in cardboard sleeves depicting original album artwork and track information, including recording dates, venues and catalogue numbers. There is a small booklet with an excellent and enjoyable article by Loïc Chahine providing the background to Gardiner’s career and encouraging us to see him through a wider prism than simply as a baroque specialist. Notably, Chahine draws attention to the influence of both Nadia Boulanger and Thurston Dart, as well as George Malcolm. When you consider the network of connections that Gardiner made at university in the early ’60s, which included fellow students David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood, it would seem that Cambridge was then something of a Darmstadt for early music.

As we continually seek to widen the canon of classical music, we have here an account of a time when the public appetite for such music was at once made broader and more inclusive. Just as I gasp in disbelief that such treasures as Handel’s Tamerlano were once considered edgy, I hope that before long I will similarly smirk at the idea that, say, Amy Beach or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor were once neglected. Through this Erato retrospective I feel encouraged to look forwards as much as back, and that’s one of the many reasons that just before the last CD here was released Gardiner won the 1994 Gramophone Artist of the Year. Sometimes you need a solid box-set to prove that Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s career simply can’t be put into a metaphorical box.

The recordings

The Complete Recordings on Erato

John Eliot Gardiner

Erato