The Constellation Orchestra & Choir and John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, one of the most influential conductors of our time and a key figure in the historically informed performance movement, is coming to Slovenia for the first time. As the founder of the Monteverdi Choir (while still a student at Cambridge) and, later, of the English Baroque Soloists, he has had a decisive impact on modern understanding of Baroque music, as well as the music of the Classical and Romantic periods. His international career, which began in the mid-1960s, has included collaborations with the world’s leading orchestras, while his extensive discography comprises more than 250 recordings. In 2024 he founded Springhead Constellation, an initiative which included the formation of two new groups, The Constellation Orchestra and Choir, with which he is continuing his exploration of repertoire from early music to the present, through vivid, direct and expressively contemporary music-making.

The programme opens with the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), a setting of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin that is one of Johannes Brahms’s most important choral works. The piece contrasts the carefree world of the gods with the uncertain and tragic human condition, bound by time and fate. Brahms completed it once he had resolved the question of the ending: instead of returning to the opening choral material, the work concludes with a bright orchestral postlude in C major that offers a calming epilogue. The second half of the programme is devoted to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Symphony No. 2, known as the “Lobgesang” (Hymn of Praise). The composer wrote it in 1840 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg’s invention of printing and conceived it as an expansive hybrid between a symphony and a cantata.