I don’t suppose classical music actually has much of a public reputation for its practitioners misbehaving. Obviously it’s a field in which there have been and must still be dickheads, but I can’t think of many stories of orchestra members attacking each other mid-performance Jane’s Addiction-style, or so fucked on drugs they couldn’t play like Syd Barrett, that sort of thing. However, John Eliot Gardiner recently chose to make a public shithead of himself by physically assaulting a singer for the heinous crime of coming off the podium on the wrong side (?!) during a performance of Les Troyens last year. This, however, has had fewer complications for his career than you might think, apparently:
We learned some time ago that two of the ensembles Gardiner founded, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, would no longer be working with the conductor following his physical attack on a company member during a concert last summer. The rest, you could hardly make up. In a move that looks dangerously close to being motivated by spite, Gardiner looks set, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, to gazump those two ensembles in the most brazen manner.
Does the following sound normal to you? On 14 December, the Monteverdi Choir and EBS will perform two Bach cantatas and a Charpentier Mass at the concert hall in Hamburg, fulfilling a contract agreed many months ago. Given the decision by those ensembles not to continue working with Gardiner following his violent conduct, the conductor Christophe Rousset was engaged by the ensembles themselves to lead the concert.
Then, a few weeks ago, the Elbphilharmonie issued an oddly contorted press release. It announced that Gardiner would conduct exactly the same programme, a week earlier, with the musicians of his newly established ensemble The Constellation Choir and Orchestra. Just to make sure the Monteverdi Choir and EBS were thrown completely under the bus, the Elbphilharmonie got all excited about Gardiner’s new ensembles and offered anyone who had booked tickets to the Monteverdi/EBS concert the chance to exchange them for tickets to the Constellation one instead.
Damn. I suppose this is kind of the classical equivalent of Taylor Swift re-recording her old albums, except that “Jiggy” doesn’t own that music in the way she owns hers. Any ensemble’s entitled to perform it, Gardiner has no exclusive right to it, and this is just him being a dickhead. Kind of impressed by the apparent speed with which he’s pulled his new orchestra together and made it ready to do these shows, just not so sure how I feel about the people who’ve agreed to join it, cos I assume they know about the punching incident (the latter, for what it’s worth, seems to have just been the last straw, with Gardiner apparently having had a reputation for being short with his performers for years)… but that’s the show for you, it has to go on, doesn’t it.
