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Britain's Monteverdi Choir had roots in the early development of the historical-performance movement in Britain but has broadened its repertory and become recognized as one of the world's premier choral groups. The choir has continued to emphasize Baroque music, however, mounting and recording an epochal Bach Cantata Pilgrimage that has made up a large proportion of its catalog after the year 2000. Composers whose music has been recorded by the Monteverdi Choir include Mendelssohn and Bruckner. In 2023, the choir, with longtime conductor John Eliot Gardiner at the helm, released a live recording of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248; the following year, Gardiner resigned as artistic director.

The Monteverdi Choir is a group of unusually long standing within the early music movement. It was founded in 1964 by John Eliot Gardiner, who at the time was a Cambridge University undergraduate. He brought the choir together for a performance of Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 at Cambridge, hoping to infuse the score with something of its original warmth and to avoid the rather academic performances that were the norm in British early music circles at the time. The choir was immediately successful and continued to use the name Monteverdi Choir even though that composer constituted only a small part of its repertory. The Monteverdi Choir made its London debut under Gardiner in 1966 at Wigmore Hall, and it remained integral to Gardiner's work as he founded new instrumental ensembles: the English Baroque Soloists and later the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, which applied historical-performance principles to music after the Baroque period. In 1986, the choir made an early digital recording of Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232, for the Archiv Produktion label, with which it was associated for the first part of its career.

The choir soon became known beyond Britain and began to tour with Gardiner, reprising the Monteverdi Vespers in 1989 at St. Mark's in Venice, replicating the original performance environment of the work. The choir traveled to New York in 1996 for the inaugural Lincoln Center Festival, where it performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, and Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. The choir explored 19th century music with that group, notably the mostly neglected choral music of Schumann. In the '90s, the Monteverdi Choir recorded both of Haydn's major oratorios. However, its main focus was Bach, who makes up a substantial proportion of the group's dozens of recordings on the Philips label and later on Gardiner's own label SDG, referring to the small "Soli Deo Gloria" ("Only to God's Glory") image Bach affixed to many of his compositions. In 2000, Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir undertook a Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, a monumental undertaking in which almost all of Bach's cantatas were performed over the course of the year in some churches associated with Bach's career. Most of the cantatas were recorded and were released during the 2000s and 2010s in sumptuously illustrated editions featuring Gardiner's reflections on the meanings of the individual works.

The Monteverdi Choir has also performed and recorded the music of many other composers, including Schütz, Handel, Mozart, and Schubert, and a 50th anniversary concert at Cambridge in 2014 repeated the choir's original Monteverdi program there. The choir began as an unusually progressive ensemble, but by that time, its sound was somewhat conservative; Gardiner avoided the very small choral groupings that characterize many modern Baroque performances. The Monteverdi Choir has remained extremely popular, however, especially in Britain. Notable recordings of the 2010s included one of Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232 (2015), Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 52 ("Lobgesang"), with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gardiner, and Love Is Come Again (2019), featuring music for an Easter play mounted at Gardiner's family home. That was a recording of a type the Monteverdi Choir had rarely essayed before, and it spoke to the venerable choir's continuing vitality. The choir slowed its production during the COVID-19 pandemic but returned in 2022 on the Deutsche Grammophon label with a live recording of Bach's St. John Passion, BWV 245, and the following year saw the release of a recording of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248. Both those performances were conducted by Gardiner, who resigned as artistic director of the Monteverdi Choir in July of 2024 after reports that he was physically abusive toward a performer. The Monteverdi Choir continued to perform independently of Gardiner. ~ James Manheim

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