John English

Taking the Bach cantatas as a basis for a year-long pilgrimage in 2000, conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner led the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists on an emotional and artistically triumphant world tour to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. These performances feature Cantatas 179, 199, and 113, all composed for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, in marvelously dramatic interpretations by the choir and soloists, including soprano Magdalena Kozen, alto William Towers, tenor Mark Padmore, and bass Stephan Loges.

It was designed to be a blockbuster and it was. Prior to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John had hits – his second album, Elton John, went Top 10 in the U.S. and U.K., and he had smash singles in "Crocodile Rock" and "Daniel" – but this 1973 album was a statement of purpose spilling over two LPs, which was all the better to showcase every element of John's spangled personality…

John Eliot Gardiner’s recording was made live at the Göttingen Festival in 1988 … the exhilaration and intensity of the performance come over vividly, with superb singing from both chorus and an almost ideal line-up of soloists … as for the Monteverdi Choir, their clarity, incisiveness and beauty are a constant delight.

The new box contains no fewer than three different Williams recordings of that most popular of all guitar works, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez – from 1964 with the Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1974 with Barenboim and the English Chamber Orchestra, and from 1983 with Frémaux and the Philharmonia Orchestra – plus a performance of its much-loved Adagio in Williams’s celebrated 1993 “Seville Concert”. That entire concert is presented here too, on both CD and DVD – the latter also including a bonus documentary portrait of the artist. Reviewing his second studio recording of the concerto, Gramophone in January 1975 proclaimed: “John Williams himself has already made one of the finest [versions], yet if possible even more conclusively this new one must be counted a winner, irresistible from first to last.

When this staging was presented in 1992, in various theatres, Gardiner decided to be his own director because he didn't trust any available alternative to be faithful to Da Ponte's and Mozart's original. In the circumstances his was a sensible decision because his deeply discerning stage interpretation perfectly seconds his own musically perceptive reading. His keen understanding of what this endlessly fascinating work is about is made plain in his absorbing essay in the booklet.