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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

With the arrival of Benjamin Britten on the international music scene, many felt that English music gained its greatest genius since Purcell. A composer of wide-ranging talents, Britten found in the human voice an especial source of inspiration, an affinity that resulted in a remarkable body of work, ranging from operas like Peter Grimes (1944-1945) and Death in Venice (1973) to song cycles like the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943) to the massive choral work War Requiem (1961). He also produced much music for orchestra and chamber ensembles, including symphonies, concerti, and chamber and solo works.

Britten's father was a prosperous oral surgeon in the town of Lowestoft, Suffolk; his mother was a leader in the local choral society. When Benjamin's musical aptitude became evident, the family engaged composer Frank Bridge to supervise his musical education. Bridge's tutelage was one of the formative and lasting influences on Britten's compositional development; he eventually paid tribute to his teacher in his Op. 10, the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937). Britten's formal training also included studies at the Royal College of Music (1930-1933).

Upon graduation from the RCM, Britten obtained a position scoring documentaries (on prosaic themes like "Sorting Office") for the Royal Post Office film unit. Working on a tight budget, he learned how to extract the maximum variety of color and musical effectiveness from the smallest combinations of instruments, producing dozens of such scores from 1935 to 1938. He rapidly emerged as the most promising British composer of his generation and entered into collaborative relationships that exerted a profound influence upon his creative life. Among the most important of his professional associates were literary figures like W.H. Auden, and later, E.M. Forster. None, however, played as central a role in Britten's life as the tenor Peter Pears, who was Britten's closest intimate, both personally and professionally, from the late '30s to the composer's death. Pears' voice inspired a number of Britten's vocal cycles and opera roles, and the two often joined forces in song recitals and, from 1948, in the organization and administration of the Aldeburgh Festival.

A steadfast pacifist, Britten left England in 1939 as war loomed over Europe. He spent four years in the United States and Canada, his compositional pace barely slackening, as evidenced by the production of works like the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), the song cycle Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), and his first effort for the stage, Paul Bunyan (1940-1941). Eventually, the poetry of George Crabbe drew Britten back to England. With a Koussevitzky Commission backing him, the composer wrote the enormously successful opera Peter Grimes (1944-1945), which marked the greatest turning point in his career. His fame secure, Britten over the next several decades wrote a dozen more operas, several of which -- Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Death in Venice (1973) -- became instant and permanent fixtures of the repertoire. He also continued to produce much vocal, orchestral, and chamber music, including Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (1965), the three Cello Suites (1961-1964) and the Cello Symphony (1963), written for Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Third String Quartet (1975).

Britten suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1971, which resulted in something of a slowdown in his creative activities. Nonetheless, he continued to compose until his death in 1976, by which time he was recognized as one of the principal musical figures of the 20th century. ~ Michael Rodman