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Sylvia McNair is a globe-trotting American soprano with an unusually clear and brilliant sound on the lighter side of the vocal spectrum. She sings a wide range of operatic and concert music, including Mozart (her specialty), Baroque operas of Handel and Monteverdi, modern works by Stravinsky and Britten, and songs of Gershwin and Jerome Kern. Although her operatic career has centered mostly on European houses, she has made selected appearances at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and, particularly since winning the Marian Anderson award in 1992, she has been a dedicated recitalist both in America and abroad. Her many recordings for the Philips and Deutsche Grammophon labels are consistently excellent, and they have been the cornerstone of her success with American audiences.

McNair was born in Mansfield, OH, the daughter of an amateur choral conductor and a piano teacher. She took lessons on both the piano and violin as a child, and continued intensive studies on the violin into her early twenties. McNair credits this early and thorough introduction to music as contributing to her success as a singer. After a bachelor's degree at Wheaton College, she entered the master's program at Indiana University, where she got her first taste of operatic singing in the university's renowned training program. After completing the young artist's program at the San Francisco Opera, she made a swift entry into the professional world, performing at the 1982 Mostly Mozart Festival, singing a range of roles with the St. Louis Opera (1983-1989), and making debuts in Santa Fe, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

From the beginning, McNair has been associated with Mozart's Pamina (The Magic Flute) and Ilia (Idomeneo), and Monteverdi's Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea), but it was her Anne Trulove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, at Glyndebourne in 1989, that launched her into the international spotlight. Since that time she has enjoyed an unbroken chain of critical and musical successes around the world, steadily praised for the beauty, intelligence, and uncommon exactness of her performances. Her work with conductor John Eliot Gardiner has established her as a fine singer of Baroque music, able to negotiate the intricacies of period ornamentation without sacrificing vocal color. Likewise, her concerts and recordings with Robert Shaw, Seiji Ozawa, Bernard Haitink, Kurt Masur, and Neville Marriner show her at ease in everything from Mozart's sacred choral works to Mahler's Symphony No. 2

This renowned mezzo soprano undertook her formal music education at the Royal Northern College of Music and made her debut in 1977 as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni with the Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Montague has appeared at the world's leading opera houses and concert halls, including Covent Garden, New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Paris Bastille, and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. She is famous for her interpretations of the leading mezzo soprano roles in operas by such composers as Mozart, Gluck, Richard Strauss, Rossini, Bellini, and Berlioz that she has realized at the Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Edinburgh festivals, among others. Her repertoire includes such rarely performed works as Donizetti's Zoraide di Granata and Rosamonda d'Inghilterra and Meyerbeer's Il Crociato in Egitto (The Crusaders in Egypt).

Anthony Rolfe Johnson was a British tenor vocalist known for his brilliant voice and vast repertoire. He was a prolific recording artist and a respected interpreter of Bach, Haydn, and especially Mozart.

Rolfe Johnson was born in London in 1940, and he sang in his church choir beginning at a very young age. He was a talented boy soprano and recorded the song "Jesus Is My Joy" with HMV, but he didn't consider singing as a career option until he was an adult. He spent his teen years on his family's farm, and later earned a degree in agriculture. In the 1960s, he managed a cattle farm in Sussex, and he sang hymns to the livestock while he worked. When he was 29 years old, he joined the choir at St. Nicholas' Church, in Worth, where his vocal talents were rediscovered. He was encouraged by other members of the choir to develop his singing and pursue a career in music. This led him to study with Vera Rozsa and Ellis Keeler at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and he also received instruction from Peter Pears.

After he completed his studies in 1973, Rolfe Johnson made his operatic debut as Count Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, and in 1975 he won the John Christie Award for his Glyndebourne debut performance in the role of Lensky from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Rolfe Johnson sang with the English National Opera for the first time in 1978 as Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute. He also performed recitals with pianist Graham Johnson and was a founding member of the Songmakers' Almanac. He toured and recorded extensively in the 1980s in a successful dual career as both an opera singer and as a recitalist. In 1988 he made his debut at Covent Garden in a production of Handel's Semele, and that same year he also relaunched the Gregynog Music Festival. Three years later, he made his debut in New York at the Met with John Elliot Gardiner conducting Mozart's Idomeneo, and he became one of Gardiner's top choices for tenor roles for the rest of his career. Rolfe Johnson was also an educator and beginning in 1990 he held an appointment as the Director of Singing Studies at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies. Later in the 1990s, he began suffering from Alzheimer's disease, which led to his retirement from performing and ultimately his death in 2010. ~ RJ Lambert

A musical singer with a substantial, if not sensuous, bass voice, Cornelius Hauptmann established himself early in his career as an artist of interest to major conductors. In addition to such mainstream figures as Kurt Masur, Kent Nagano, and Leonard Bernstein, several period performance conductors elected to engage the young singer, maestri including John Eliot Gardiner, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Christopher Hogwood, Michel Corboz, and Roger Norrington. His performances divide themselves into oratorio, song recitals, and opera, the latter reflecting a devotion to the stage works of Mozart.

After studying at Stuttgart's Music Academy, Hauptmann entered the Conservatory in Bern, Switzerland, where he continued his training as a pupil of bass Jakob Stämpfli. Upon receiving his diploma, he undertook master classes with several great artists of the previous generation, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Hans Hotter, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau most prominent among them. Hauptmann made his formal stage debut at the Stuttgart Staatsoper in 1981, remaining with that theater until 1989. At first assigned to small parts, he eventually graduated to the role of Masetto and thereafter was heard mostly as principal characters. From 1985 to 1987, Hauptmann was also engaged at Heidelberg, where he was heard as Osmin, Sarastro, Sparafucile, and Mozart's Figaro. Guest appearances took him to Paris, Frankfurt, and Reykjavik and he began singing at a number of important European festivals; Aix-en-Provence and Schwetzingen were among the first on a list that came to number in the dozens.

In 1991, Hauptmann appeared in a concert performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at London's Royal Festival Hall. That same year, he sang Sarastro at the Deutschen Oper Berlin; four years later, he appeared as Sarastro at Lyon. In 1988, he sang Mozart's Requiem with Bernstein and made an appearance at Salzburg as bass soloist in Mozart's Mass in C minor. By the new millennium, Hauptmann had also been heard in the major opera houses of Munich, Leipzig, Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Zürich, and Orléans.

In addition to two recordings of Sarastro and Philip Glass' Akhnaten, Hauptmann is heard as soloist on CDs devoted to Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri, Enescu's Oedipe, and oratorios of Schütz, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn. Lieder recitals for Naxos and Bayer are devoted to songs of Schubert and Loewe.

Trained at the Guildhall School of Music in London, Lisa Beznosiuk became a favorite flutist of English period-instrument groups, bringing a degree of warmth to an instrument that other Baroque specialists tended to mechanically approach. Beznosiuk studied modern flute with Kathryn Lukas and Baroque flute with Stephen Preston. She made her solo debut in London in 1983 and as a member of that city's pool of freelance early music specialists, she performed and recorded widely with the English Baroque Soloists, the Academy of Ancient Music, and the English Concert. She helped found the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and joined the London Classical Players in 1992 as principal flute. She also performed as a recitalist with the likes of lutenist Nigel North, harpsichordist Maggie Cole, and cellist Richard Tunnicliffe, her husband. One of Beznosiuk's most-notable recordings is of Mozart's G major concerto with conductor Christopher Hogwood, which for its fluency, nuance, and spirit holds its own against recordings by more famous virtuosi. Beznosiuk teaches at several conservatories in the London area.

The English Baroque Soloists has established itself among the world's leading period instrument orchestras. Founder and artistic director John Eliot Gardiner regularly joins his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in opera and choral performances. The EBS repertoire takes in music from the Classical period as well as the Baroque. Together, the groups launched the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000, performing all of Bach's sacred cantatas throughout Europe. The EBS has toured widely and has been heard on over 100 recordings. In 2020, the EBS and Monteverdi Choir, under Gardiner, issued a recording of Handel: Semele.

Although the English Baroque Soloists was officially established as a chamber ensemble of period instruments in 1978, the group actually gave its first concert at the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, in a performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea. Founded by John Eliot Gardiner, the EBS drew many of its original members from another group Gardiner had founded (in 1968), the Monteverdi Orchestra. Shortly after its founding, Bach and Handel were largely the focus of the EBS. However, the group became closely associated with Mozart's music, mainly because of its numerous, generally highly acclaimed recordings of his works. In 1984, Gardiner and the EBS launched a series for the Archiv Produktion label devoted to Mozart's concertos for piano and orchestra with soloist Malcolm Bilson (using a fortepiano) and the first such cycle using period instruments. Two years later, with the concerto series ongoing, it launched another Mozart project, this one to cover the mature symphonies for Philips. In the summer of 1990, the EBS debuted at the Salzburg Festival, giving three concerts, all to critical acclaim.

With the 1990 release of Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491, and No. 27, K. 595, the piano concerto series was completed, but the EBS and Gardiner immediately set to work recording the seven mature operas of Mozart for Archiv Produktion. The first release in this cycle, Idomeneo, won Gramophone's Best Opera Award in 1991. In that same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and the Monteverdi Choir appeared in a live BBC television broadcast of Mozart's Requiem performed at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The last issue in the Gardiner/EBS Mozart operas series, Die Zauberflöte, was released in 1996, after which it turned to the music of Bach.

In the late 1990s, a new series of recordings began with the release in 2000 of Bach's Cantatas No. 6 "Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend" (BWV 6) and No. 66, "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen" (BWV 66). Along with the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner and the EBS performed the entire cycle of 198 Bach cantatas throughout various European churches in 2000 on its Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. The EBS was hardly focusing on only Mozart or Bach in the 1990s: its performance at Covent Garden in 1995 of Haydn's Die Schöpfung was enthusiastically received and led to a successful 1997 recording on Archiv Produktion. Also, in 1995, the EBS and the Monteverdi Choir performed the music for the film England, My England, a highly acclaimed movie directed by Tony Palmer about composer Henry Purcell. That same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and Monteverdi Choir issued a multi-disc set on the label Erato devoted to Purcell's music. 2005 saw the creation of the Soli Deo Gloria label by the combined Gardiner ensembles to issue recordings from the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Since then, the EBS has issued a number of recordings for the label, including Handel: Semele, with the Monteverdi Choir and conducted by Gardiner, in 2020. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner is a leading figure in the historical performance movement, having founded the Monteverdi Choir for performances of Baroque music and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, devoted to music of the 19th century. He is especially noted for performances and recordings of Bach's choral music, and his label, Soli Deo Gloria ("To the Glory of God Only"), takes its name from the small S.D.G. signature Bach affixed to many of his works.

Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943, in the village of Fontmell Magna in England's Dorset County. It is worth notice that for the first part of his musical education, he was largely self-taught: he sang in a village church choir and played the violin. At 15, he took up conducting, and while he was studying history, Arabic, and medieval Spanish at Cambridge, he also began conducting choirs there. He led choirs from Oxford and Cambridge on a Middle Eastern tour while still an undergraduate, and in 1964, he conducted a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, a work little known at the time. Out of this performance grew the Monteverdi Choir, his primary performing ensemble. Gardiner studied musicology and conducting with Thurston Dart and Nadia Boulanger in the mid-'60s, which was his only period of formal musical study. In 1968, he founded a Monteverdi Orchestra to go with the choir; in the '70s, the group began to use Baroque instruments and was renamed the English Baroque Soloists. With this group and the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner has made recordings numbering in the hundreds. Mostly during the first part of his career, he also worked with conventional symphony orchestras. His U.S. debut came in 1979 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and in the '80s and early '90s, he was music director of the CBC Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Opera de Lyon Orchestra, and the North German Radio Orchestra (now the NDR Elbphilharmonie). In 1990, as understanding of the historical instruments used in the music of Beethoven and subsequent composers was just developing, he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, leading it on tour in 1993 with a then recently rediscovered Messe solennelle of Berlioz.

One of Gardiner's most celebrated accomplishments was his Bach Cantata Pilgrimage of 2000, with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists. The group toured for 52 weeks, performing all of Bach's cantatas at their appropriate times in the liturgical year, often in churches with relevance in Bach's own career. The performances were recorded and issued in lavish packaging on Soli Deo Gloria, with essays by Gardiner delving into the meaning of each work. These essays led Gardiner to publish a book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013). Gardiner has also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and other labels. His Schumann symphony recordings with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique are credited with introducing a trend toward smaller forces in those works. Another major tour came in Spain in 2004, as Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir retraced the medieval Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route and sang medieval Spanish repertory. Gardiner has also appeared as a guest conductor with major symphony orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra. His recording career has not slackened in the least in his senior citizen years, as he has often released a half-dozen recordings per year or more. In 2019, he and the Monteverdi Choir released Love is come again, featuring music from the Springhead Easter Play, a mime event staged annually at Gardiner's family home and originally directed by his mother. He was not slowed much in 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic, for he already had material in the hopper, including a modern-instrument recording of a pair of Schumann symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. He returned in 2022 with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in a new recording for the Deutsche Grammophon label of Bach's St. John Passion, BWV 245. Gardiner's many awards include designation as Commander of the British Empire in 1990 and as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France in 2011. ~ James Manheim

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not only one of the greatest composers of the Classical period, but one of the greatest of all time. Surprisingly, he is not identified with radical formal or harmonic innovations, or with the profound kind of symbolism heard in some of Bach's works. Mozart's best music has a natural flow and irresistible charm, and can express humor, joy or sorrow with both conviction and mastery. His operas, especially his later efforts, are brilliant examples of high art, as are many of his piano concertos and later symphonies. Even his lesser compositions and juvenile works feature much attractive and often masterful music.

Mozart was the last of seven children, of whom five did not survive early childhood. By the age of three he was playing the clavichord, and at four he began writing short compositions. Young Wolfgang gave his first public performance at the age of five at Salzburg University, and in January 1762, he performed on harpsichord for the Elector of Bavaria. There are many astonishing accounts of the young Mozart's precocity and genius. At the age of seven, for instance, he picked up a violin at a musical gathering and sight-read the second part of a work with complete accuracy, despite his never having had a violin lesson.

In the years 1763-1766, Mozart, along with his father Leopold, a composer and musician, and sister Nannerl, also a musically talented child, toured London, Paris, and other parts of Europe, giving many successful concerts and performing before royalty. The Mozart family returned to Salzburg in November 1766. The following year young Wolfgang composed his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus. Keyboard concertos and other major works also came from his pen.

In 1769, Mozart was appointed Konzertmeister at the Salzburg Court by the Archbishop. Beginning that same year, the Mozarts made three tours of Italy, where the young composer studied Italian opera and produced two successful efforts, Mitridate and Lucio Silla. In 1773, Mozart was back in Austria, where he spent most of the next few years composing. He wrote all his violin concertos between 1774 and 1777, as well as Masses, symphonies, and chamber works.

In 1780, Mozart wrote his opera Idomeneo, which became a sensation in Munich. After a conflict with the Archbishop, Mozart left his Konzertmeister post and settled in Vienna. He received a number of commissions and took on a well-paying but unimportant Court post. In 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber and took her to Salzburg the following year to introduce her to his family. 1782 was also the year that saw his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail staged with great success.

In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, apparently embracing the teachings of that group. He would later write music for certain Masonic lodges. In the early and mid-1780s, Mozart composed many sonatas and quartets, and often appeared as soloist in the 15 piano concertos he wrote during this period. Many of his commissions were for operas now, and Mozart met them with a string of masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro came 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, Così fan tutte in 1790, and Die Zauberflöte in 1791. Mozart made a number of trips in his last years, and while his health had been fragile in previous times, he displayed no serious condition or illness until he developed a fever of unknown origin near the end of 1791. ~ Robert Cummings