Following studies in conducting in London and Paris – in the French capital his teacher was Nadia Boulanger – John Eliot Gardiner pursued two parallel paths: on the one hand, he appeared with established institutions that included the opera houses in London, Zurich and Lyons and with international orchestras such as the NDR Sinfonieorchester in Hamburg and the Wiener Philharmoniker; but at the same time he also worked with his own early music ensembles, which he himself had founded and helped to mould. The Monteverdi Choir that was at the very heart of these ensembles had been founded in 1964, followed in 1978 by the English Baroque Soloists with whom he made many pioneering recordings of music ranging from the early Baroque to Mozart and Haydn. Recordings which have lost none of their brilliance in the course of the intervening decades. They retain their value not least through the outstanding soloists that Gardiner was able to engage, many of them still at the start of their illustrious careers.

Gardiner has always been a complete musician, and so it was inevitable that he would want to perform the music of the nineteenth century on instruments from that period with the result that in 1989 he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, a name that points to the tradition established by the conductor François-Antoine Habeneck. Gardiner’s recordings of Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann not least, in the present edition are milestones in the history of interpretation. His recordings will continue to endure: in their energy-laden delight in making music, in their spiritualized expressivity and in their gripping vitality.