Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

Period-instrument performance was largely an amateur pursuit in Britain when John Eliot Gardiner formed the Monteverdi Orchestra in the late ‘60s; by the time he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (ORR) in 1989, it had grown into a professional business. His tireless quest for the original sound and spirit of music from the 19th century led him to build on the established work of his English Baroque Soloists while drawing from the deepening international talent pool of musicians schooled in historically informed performance. His manifesto for the ORR’s London debut underlined the value of period instruments, which helped offer fresh perspectives on familiar works. Gardiner’s band retrieved long lost orchestral tone colours. They underlined the point in their early days with a light-bulb-moment performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, filmed at the historic Conservatoire de Musique in Paris, the site of its premiere in 1830. Gardiner conducted his orchestra in the first modern performance of Berlioz’s Messe Solennelle on tour and on disc in 1993. That achievement set the bar high for future ambitious projects, including multiple cycles of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, outstanding performances of Berlioz’s monumental opera Les Troyens (the first complete staging in Paris among them) and the first modern presentation of the same composer’s opera Benvenuto Cellini on period instruments, as well as revelatory interpretations of Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Falstaff and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.