EdwardGardner

Press

• BBC Proms 2023

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Aug 2023

  • ★★★★ Gardner’s interpretation was a thing of extremes. The quiet, penumbral opening Introit seemed to hover on the verges of sound and silence. Later, the roaring brass of the Dies Irae pinned you to your seat.

    • The Guardian
    • 13 August 2023

  • ★★★★ All this music was thrillingly brought together here in a kind of 2001 reunion Prom by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under its principal conductor, Edward Gardner.

    • The Times
    • 14 August 2023

  • Gardner was in his element with this opulent material, and coaxed the orchestra into bringing every scintilla of nuance to this work of shifting moods, controlling tempo, dynamic and texture with fluid but commanding gestures to bring us a sensuously warm string sound, and bright, clear woodwinds.

    • Music OMH
    • 12 August 2023

  • ★★★★★ The London Philharmonic Orchestra were conducted by Edward Gardner with aplomb and determination, while the three choirs and two soloists left the capacity audience in delighted appreciation.

    • Broadway World
    • 12 August 2023

• Mahler: Symphony No. 5

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Apr 2023

  • ★★★★ It was in the finale where Gardner’s play-it-cool approach paid off: solo turns oozed character, the string sound was eked from somewhere elemental and the lower brass blossomed ferociously, gleaming as the massive whole tumbled to a close.

    • The Guardian
    • 27 April 2023

  • ★★★★ There were many virtues in Gardner’s interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, among them the attention to articulation, to carefully balanced contrapuntal lines and a convincing overarching structure.

    • The Evening Standard
    • 27 April 2023

  • ★★★★ He shone clear light on the thrilling local shifts between hope and despair, serenity and turbulence, that drive the development not just between the five movements but inside each.

    • ArtsDesk
    • 27 April 2023

• Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Feb 2023

  • ★★★★★ With his choral and operatic roots, Gardner has a special flair for taming such genre-crossing, massed-choir monsters... Gardner elicited not just emphatic grandeur and scary jubilation but hushed tenderness from his huge forces.

    • ArtsDesk
    • 06 February 2023

  • ★★★★ During every stage of this performance of Berlioz’s “dramatic legend” The Damnation of Faust, conductor and musicians were equally superb, articulating and colouring the composers’ imaginings so skilfully that we saw everything the dream-like libretto laid out before us.

    • The Times
    • 06 February 2023

  • ★★★★ The evening ultimately belonged to Gardner, his orchestra, and those superb choirs.

    • The Guardian
    • 06 February 2023

  • ★★★★★ Uniting them all, Principal Conductor Edward Gardner was in complete control of his forces, leading the LPO in a richly textured reading of the score, abundant in both detail and drama.

    • Bachtrack
    • 06 February 2023

• Tippett: A Child of Our Time

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Nov 2022

  • ★★★★★ Gardner, with all his voices, had amply confirmed that Tippett’s forlorn child can still speak to, and of, our time.

    • ArtsDesk
    • 28 November 2022

  • ★★★★ As to be expected, Gardner’s interpretation demonstrated a consummate understanding of the drama of the work, and under his relaxed but analytical control both orchestra and chorus produced a moving account, chock-full of subtle shadings of dynamic, tempo and timbre.

    • Music OMH
    • 26 November 2022

  • ★★★★ Yet in a performance as fervent as Edward Gardner conducted here with the London Philharmonic (celebrating its 90th anniversary), the work still moves, outrages and consoles in equal measure.

    • The Times
    • 28 November 2022

• Schoenberg: Gurrelieder

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Sep 2022

  • ★★★★ The London Philharmonic’s new season opened with Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, superbly conducted by Edward Gardner, and finely sung. Pivoting between post-Romantic excess and modernist experimentation, it’s a work that in many ways suits Gardner down to the ground, and throughout he was marvellously alert to the complexities of its soundworld, yet all the while focused on its dramatic momentum and metaphysical grandeur.

    • The Guardian
    • 26 September 2022

• Elgar: Dream of Gerontius

  London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Aug 2022

  • ★★★★★ The tremendous driving impulse of this superb performance, with Edward Gardner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra with magisterial assurance, was the way it combined theatricality, believability and sheer orchestral and choral beauty into one wonderfully complex tapestry.

    • The Times
    • 01 September 2022

  • ★★★★★ [Edward Gardner] is a superb Elgarian, but never an infatuated one: no slush clogged his interpretation here, although there were moments of painful sweetness and pianissimo poignancy. Crystalline lucidity characterised the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s playing, clarifying the instrumental detail, the staccati and fugato; words were never swamped by climaxes, and the diction of the massed Hallé and London Philharmonic choirs was exemplary throughout … Gardner vividly dramatised all the hot anguish and feverish longing for calm that surges through the restless Wagnerian Prelude, the urgent imprecations of ‘Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus’ and Gerontius’s dying terror. Even if Cardinal Newman’s verse is morbidly religiose, and his view of the approach to Heaven (as a passport hall with the Angel acting as a friendly immigration officer) seems faintly risible to modern sensibilities, Elgar believed fervently in it all, and Gardner honoured his sincerity.

    • The Telegraph
    • 01 September 2022

• Britten: Peter Grimes

  Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra

  Nov 2019

  • ★★★★★ [the Bergen Philharmonic’s semi-staging of Britten’s Peter Grimes] can only be described as a formidable achievement, at once fiercely intelligent and visceral in its power... Gardner’s interpretation, already familiar from performances at ENO and the Proms, places the emphasis on the metaphysical links between the arbitrary violence of nature and the abyss of the human soul. The Bergen orchestra’s playing combines richness with precision, and Britten’s seascapes glittered balefully even in moments of uneasy calm. The storm of act one, meanwhile, found its hideous human counterpart in the lynch mob that later bays for Grimes’s blood.

    • The Guardian
    • 02 December 2019

  • ★★★★★  [Ed Gardner and Stuart Skelton’s] is one of the great musical partnerships, and they continue to find compelling new depths in this tragic masterpiece... Having the orchestra out front, rather than confined in the pit, not only imparted a tremendous punch to the fortissimo passages, it also allowed Gardner to reveal more fully than I have ever heard the wealth of atmospheric instrumental detail Britten poured into his score.

    • The Times
    • 02 December 2019

  • ★★★★ Every little detail, like the gutty pizzicati for the Nieces' wailing in the gale and the flurries of the magnificent Passacaglia, hit home with renewed realisation of Britten's genius at every turn… The total triumph of the evening, then, rested with Gardner and his magnificent players. We need them back in concert at the Festival Hall, and soon.

    • ArtsDesk
    • 01 December 2019

  • ★★★★ [Ed Gardner’s] command of Britten’s dramatic idiom is second to none. His pacing was perfect, his ability to make way for the singers’ words the work of a true operatic master, and in his hands the Sea Interludes took their place as central parts of the drama, rather than as mere scene-setting, most thrillingly in a real “bitch of a gale” in the Act 1 storm (to quote Captain Balstrode).

    • Bachtrack
    • 01 December 2019

  • ★★★★★ This poleaxing performance by a stellar cast backed by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner cut into the bone like an icy North Sea wind.

    • Evening Standard
    • 02 December 2019

• Massenet: Werther

  Royal Opera House, London

  Sep 2019

  • Gardner, meanwhile, is superb in his understanding of both the score’s emotional complexities and its dark Wagnerian undertow.

    • The Guardian
    • 18 September 2019

  • Edward Gardner is outstanding

    • Financial Times
    • 19 September 2019

  • Conductor Edward Gardner does full justice to Massenet’s expansive orchestra without sacrificing dramatic momentum.

    • Evening Standard
    • 19 September 2019