CCMusic.com

John Eliot Gardiner will celebrate his 80th birthday on 20th April 2023. On 7th April, we are releasing a 64-CD boxset including his complete Erato Recordings, and are also celebrating this wonderful conductor with two of his most emblematic albums to be released on vinyl: Purcell's King Arthur and Handel's Water Music.

As John Eliot Gardiner converted his Monteverdi Orchestra to early instruments in the mid-1970s and renamed it the English Baroque Soloists, he engaged his magnificent instrumentalists, choir and a host of first-class soloists in the most emblematic works by "the Greatest Genius we [England] ever had": Henry Purcell! The reception was unanimously enthusiastic and led Diapason magazine to say: "Gardiner's reading of Purcell, dramatic, hyper-refined, sometimes burning, overwhelming, at all times enchanting, cannot escape the discography of the enlightened music lover. Purcell himself is there!"

King Arthur was first staged at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London in mid-1691. It proved to be the most popular and enduring of all Purcell's stage works, and enjoyed revivals throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.