Monteverdi Choir

The Monteverdi Choir was formed forty-five years ago by Sir John Eliot Gardiner for a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers (1610) in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Its original aim was to explore a wide repertoire fanning out from the Baroque, and it soon became famous for its passionate, committed singing, and the ability to switch composer, language and idiom with stylistic conviction.

The Monteverdi Choir has undertaken numerous trail-blazing tours. The most ambitious was the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists during which they performed all one hundred and ninety-eight 8 of J.S. Bach's sacred cantatas in more than sixty churches throughout Europe to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. During the summer of 2004, the Choir undertook another pilgrimage along the oldest and most famous of pilgrimage routes, el Camino de Santiago, giving fourteen a cappella concerts in churches along the route to Santiago de Compostela.

Their set of recordings of the Bach Cantatas from the 2000 pilgrimage is currently being released on Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s record label Soli Deo Gloria. The first release was awarded Gramophone Record of the year in 2005. The success of the Soli Deo Gloria label continues with the release of its first non-Bach, independently produced recording, Pilgrimage to Santiago, with the Monteverdi Choir, which was described by the Sunday Times as its Record of the Year.

In a partnership with the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris the Monteverdi Choir provided the chorus for productions of Verdi's Falstaff in 2001, Weber's Oberon in 2002, and the first complete performances in France of Berlioz's opera Les Troyens in 2003, a staging which was awarded the Grand Prix by the French Journalists' Union. The Choir has more than a hundred recordings to its name and has won numerous awards and prizes.

In 2006 the Monteverdi Choir celebrated Mozart's 250th anniversary with European tours of his Requiem and Mass in C Minor and Mozart Opera Gala Concerts London and Paris. In December 2006 they toured with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists in a programme of Bach Advent Cantatas.

In February 2007, with the English Baroque Soloists they took part in the “Domaine Privé de Sir John Eliot Gardiner” at Cité de la musique in Paris, a week-long series of events focusing on the music of Rameau and his contemporaries and December 2007 saw the start of an exciting collaboration between the Monteverdi and the Théâtre national de l’opéra-comique, Paris: Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in eight fully-staged  performances of Emmanuel Chabrier's Opera bouffe, L'Etoile.

In October 2008 they completed a two-year project involving 26 performances of five different Brahms-based with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and more recently they joined the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under John Eliot Gardiner for the Nobel Prize Ceremony concert in Stockholm.

Recent projects in 2009 included a return to the Opéra Comique in Paris for a fully-staged run of Bizet’s Carmen and tours round Europe of Handel’s Israel in Egypt. Projects for the season 2009/10 include tours in the USA and Europe with Haydn’s two great oratorios Die Jahreszeiten and Die Schöpfung, and with Bach's Mass in B Minor.