Musikfest 2: Love’s Stranger Triumphs

For more than fifty years, Sir John Eliot Gardiner has been one of Monteverdi’s most persuasive champions. He has not been alone of course – Nikolaus Harnoncourt was also instrumental in reintroducing the wider public to Monteverdi’s dramatic and sacred works around the time of the composer’s fourth centenary in 1967 – but he has been remarkably persistent in his advocacy. This year, in celebration of Monteverdi’s 450th birthday, he has assembled a group of musicians – the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and an extensive cast of vocal soloists – to take the three surviving operas on a world tour. Yet their three sold out evenings in Berlin, presented as a cornerstone of this year’s Musikfest, were less a labour of musical outreach than a victory lap, and the rapturous response which greeted their performance of…