2023-04-30 18:39:25
ARTE − SUNDAY, APRIL 30 AT 6.45 P.M. − DOCUMENTARY AND CONCERTS
On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Arte offers, throughout the day of Sunday April 30, three programs consisting of two concerts, recorded at the Salzburg Festival, in 2021, and on Radio France, in 2022, and a documentary by Natascha Pflaumbaum, John Eliot Gardiner: The Art of Conducting.
The please insert d’Arte announced that the conductor, known for his historically informed interpretations at the head of ensembles of period instruments, opened, on the occasion of this filmed portrait, the gates of Gore Farm, his organic farm in Dorset, some 200 kilometers from London, not far from the childhood home where he was raised by a cultured and music-loving family.
Founded by his great-uncle Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877-1950), composer, patron and farmer, this operation was taken over by Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), the father of John Eliot, known for his pioneering activities in the field of forestation and organic farming, then by his son. Unfortunately, this subject is not dug.
Controversial intellectual figure
And we would have liked to know more about Rolf Gardiner, a famous but controversial intellectual figure in England, in particular because of his links with Hitler’s Germany, which he visited regularly until 1939 – without being a “British Nazi”as scholars Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley recall in the book Rolf Gardiner : Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (“Folklore, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain”, Ashgate, 2012, untranslated).
As for the musical subject, the documentary is remarkably flat, not free from hagiographic remarks and naivety – and illustrated with a languidly banal soundtrack. The remarks of the conductor, despite his great intelligence and great culture, are here also rather vague. Sir John definitely deserved better.
We will more readily refer to the two concerts on the menu for this special day, which are absolutely magnificent: at the Salzburg Festival 2021, Gardiner performed incidental music written by Felix Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night’s dreamby Shakespeare, interspersed with extracts, in German, of the said play.
Reinvited for the second consecutive year by the Orchester philharmonique de Radio France, John Eliot Gardiner conducted there, in 2022, one of his chosen composers, Hector Berlioz, in a striking interpretation ofHarold and Italywith the French violist Antoine Tamestit in the role of an instrumental “character”, that of the “melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe-Harold” described by Berlioz in his Memoirs.
John Eliot Gardiner: The Art of Conductingby Natascha Pflaumbaum (Germany, 2022, 51 min), on Arte.tv until July 18.
Concert : Harold in Italy, by Berlioz, by Antoine Tamestit (viola), Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, John Eliot Gardiner (2022).
Concert : A Midsummer Night’s dreamby Felix Mendelssohn, at the Salzburg Festival 2021, by The Monteverdi Choir, the Camerata Salzburg, John Eliot Gardiner (2021).
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