English Baroque Soloists - Handel - Water Music; Music for the Royal Fireworks etc. (2023)

The English Baroque Soloists has established itself among the world's leading period instrument orchestras. Founder and artistic director John Eliot Gardiner regularly joins his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in opera and choral performances. The EBS repertoire takes in music from the Classical period as well as the Baroque. Together, the groups launched the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000, performing all of Bach's sacred cantatas throughout Europe. The EBS has toured widely and has been heard on over 100 recordings. In 2020, the EBS and Monteverdi Choir, under Gardiner, issued a recording of Handel: Semele.

Although the English Baroque Soloists was officially established as a chamber ensemble of period instruments in 1978, the group actually gave its first concert at the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, in a performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea. Founded by John Eliot Gardiner, the EBS drew many of its original members from another group Gardiner had founded (in 1968), the Monteverdi Orchestra. Shortly after its founding, Bach and Handel were largely the focus of the EBS. However, the group became closely associated with Mozart's music, mainly because of its numerous, generally highly acclaimed recordings of his works. In 1984, Gardiner and the EBS launched a series for the Archiv Produktion label devoted to Mozart's concertos for piano and orchestra with soloist Malcolm Bilson (using a fortepiano) and the first such cycle using period instruments. Two years later, with the concerto series ongoing, it launched another Mozart project, this one to cover the mature symphonies for Philips. In the summer of 1990, the EBS debuted at the Salzburg Festival, giving three concerts, all to critical acclaim.

With the 1990 release of Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491, and No. 27, K. 595, the piano concerto series was completed, but the EBS and Gardiner immediately set to work recording the seven mature operas of Mozart for Archiv Produktion. The first release in this cycle, Idomeneo, won Gramophone's Best Opera Award in 1991. In that same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and the Monteverdi Choir appeared in a live BBC television broadcast of Mozart's Requiem performed at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The last issue in the Gardiner/EBS Mozart operas series, Die Zauberflöte, was released in 1996, after which it turned to the music of Bach.

In the late 1990s, a new series of recordings began with the release in 2000 of Bach's Cantatas No. 6 "Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend" (BWV 6) and No. 66, "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen" (BWV 66). Along with the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner and the EBS performed the entire cycle of 198 Bach cantatas throughout various European churches in 2000 on its Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. The EBS was hardly focusing on only Mozart or Bach in the 1990s: its performance at Covent Garden in 1995 of Haydn's Die Schöpfung was enthusiastically received and led to a successful 1997 recording on Archiv Produktion. Also, in 1995, the EBS and the Monteverdi Choir performed the music for the film England, My England, a highly acclaimed movie directed by Tony Palmer about composer Henry Purcell. That same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and Monteverdi Choir issued a multi-disc set on the label Erato devoted to Purcell's music. 2005 saw the creation of the Soli Deo Gloria label by the combined Gardiner ensembles to issue recordings from the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Since then, the EBS has issued a number of recordings for the label, including Handel: Semele, with the Monteverdi Choir and conducted by Gardiner, in 2020. © Robert Cummings