Giovanni Antonini on Il Giardino Armonico

The Italian period instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, having begun life in the 1980s as a trio and subsequently expanded into a chamber orchestra which is currently partway through an ambitious project to record all 107 of Haydn's symphonies in time for the composer's tercentenary in 2032.

Earlier this summer I sat down with founder-member and Music Director Giovanni Antonini to discuss the group's identity and evolution, what might be planned to mark the culmination of that mammoth Haydn series in seven years' time, why he does his most inspired work at the eleventh hour - and his fervent belief that 'everything in Italy is theatre, for better or for worse'...

How was the ensemble born? 

I was very young, only twenty years old: I’d just finished my studies, and I was keen to do some concerts as a trio with recorder and basso continuo. I enlisted my friends Paolo Beschi (cello) and Lorenzo Ghielmi (harpsichord), and together we founded what would become Il Giardino Armonico. It was a very simple beginning. 

The name of the group was originally Il Giardino Musicale; a year later we were joined by the theorbist Luca Pianca, staying focused on music for recorder and basso continuo. The first bigger project was when we decided to perform and record the Vivaldi Concerti da Camera, which are essentially concerti without orchestra - they require seven or eight musicians. 

That was our first big chance to show what made Il Giardino Armonico unique - this was a different Vivaldi from what people were playing in Holland or England, or even from the Italian tradition of I Musici and I Solisti Veneti. Those years in the late 1980s were the period when we started to receive serious attention from the public and from critics. 

When did recording become part of your activities?

Our first recording as a chamber orchestra was an album of Baroque Christmas concertos, in 1990. We were already recording for Teldec Classics on the prestigious label Das Alte Werk, which also boasted Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt and Frans Brüggen; it was through Harnoncourt’s influence that they offered us an exclusive contract, and we’d recorded all of the concerti da camera by Vivaldi by the time they asked us to do the Christmas album. At that point we didn’t have an orchestra, so we decided to create a small string ensemble - and that was the moment when I also started to conduct...

Had you always wanted to conduct?

I think I probably did on some level, even if I didn’t realise it! My role was more or less primus inter pares from the beginning, in that I was the person who pushed these beautiful musicians in a particular direction. When we did the Christmas project, I started to find it really fascinating: our ethos was to push ourselves to the extremes in terms of tempi, intonation, articulation and theatricality, and we rehearsed so intensively. I was essentially self-taught as a conductor, and I learned so much from the musicians - for many of us, Il Giardino Armonico was our true conservatory.

It was very much a meeting of different musical minds - Luca had studied with Harnoncourt, our violinist Enrico Onofri was a very original musician, and we combined these ideas ito bring out the drama in the music. The concerto form is already a dramatic one because it’s built on opposition (and sometimes collaboration) of the soloist and tutti, and we really leaned into that. 

And part of it is just because we’re Italians - our country invented opera, and we’re quite theatrical people even in day-to-day life. The way we communicate is full of irony and drama - you need only watch our politicians on TV to see that…Everything in Italy is theatre, for better or for worse.

But you can’t live off instinct alone - you have to do your research too. Our goal was for everything to sound as natural as possible, but there’s a lot of scholarly work and painstaking rehearsal behind that. That combination of intense academic focus and a certain Southern European sensibility was how the Giardino Armonico concept and sound was created.

Did you have any mentors?

There was already a sort of Vivaldi renaissance underway in Italy by the time we arrived on the scene, although opera came much later. We mustn’t forget the earlier groups like I Solisti Veneti and I Musici, who started out with modern instruments just after World War Two. When I was a child I listened to their recordings over and over, and later I loved Harnoncourt - they were the foundation on which I built my taste, and my love for Vivaldi’s music.

We’re based in Milan, but in a sense we’re nomads in that we mainly play outside Italy. In Germany you see ensembles like the Freiburger Barockorchester who have really strong relationships with their home city, but unfortunately it’s never been like that for us: in Italy it’s very difficult to get institutional support, and I feel like we’ve never been recognised as an integral part of Milan’s cultural life. There’s an element of 'Nemo propheta in patria' ['no one is a prophet in his own land'] in that although there are many music-lovers in Italy who adore what we do, the Powers That Be have never really backed us. 

In a way that’s sad, but I’m very proud that we’ve survived for forty years without any sponsors and basically lived off our wits. It pushes us to keep performing at the highest level possible and to demonstrate that Il Giardino Armonico offers something special and different; we never have time to sit on our laurels, and I’m grateful for that.

When did you branch into operatic repertoire?

Our first foray was a collaboration with Cecilia Bartoli, and because we already took a very dramatic approach to Vivaldi it immediately felt like a natural environment for us. Cecilia is from Rome, we are from North Italy, and without even discussing things much we found we had the same mindset.

At the time Cecilia was mainly known as a Rossini specialist - I’d seen her incredible performances in the 1990s and was blown away by her expressivity and technical brilliance. Her idea was to record some of Vivaldi’s best opera arias, which was quite an unusual thing to do back then; Handel’s operas were part of the canon by that point, but Vivaldi was much more known as an instrumental composer. 

Very few people had confidence in the project, even at Decca (Cecilia’s record label) - there was one producer who absolutely believed in what we were doing, but the rest of the label were convinced that vocal music by Vivaldi would never sell! But it went on to be a great success, winning a Grammy in 2000, and marked the beginning of a fantastic collaboration.

I learned so much from Cecilia about the art of rhetoric, especially about how to make soft, slow music really speak: there’s an incredible aria on the album called 'Gelida in ogni vena', which starts like 'Winter' from The Four Seasons, and I was in awe of the way she sustained such tension with an immaculate legato across twelve minutes of music without singing above pianissimo. In the live concerts the effect was incredible! 

When did non-Italian repertoire enter the picture?

We started in the 90s, with recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos and an album called The Tempest with music by Biber and Locke. The response to the Brandenburgs was interesting, because a lot of people expected the same super-fast approach which we took to Vivaldi…but Bach is not Vivaldi, and it requires a different touch. To my ears our Brandenburgs are full of life, and you can achieve that without slamming your foot on the accelerator!

Perception and expectation are funny things - only yesterday I got quite a rude email from a listener who was grumbling that we no longer sound like we did on our early Vivaldi recordings and have become more generic. I can’t agree, because all the elements which were there in the beginning are still there - we’ve just developed them. If you create a strong image for yourself you often get pushback from people if you alter it even a little bit, but I’d hate for us to be running on autopilot just to live up to others’ expectations. 

All our recordings still sound fresh to me, partly because each one is the culmination of many concert performances and we bring that same energy into the studio - I think that’s a winning strategy. These days thousands of recordings are made each year because the process has become so much easier, but I still think they should be approached as something special. A recording can never be your final take on a work because your interpretation will always continue to evolve…I see it as a photograph of a unique place on that journey.

And the recording industry has changed so dramatically since you started out…

It’s a mystery to me that the labels can survive…CD sales are very low in general now and even classical music is consumed mainly through streaming services, which don’t generate so much income. But people are recording a lot again and I’m happy for that because at one point I thought ‘OK, it’s finished - nobody will listen and there will be no money to make more’. But here we are.

Labels are investing a lot, but let’s say that some of the bigger companies aren’t necessarily motivated by purely artistic concerns…I do understand that, but I’m very grateful that the Outhere Group (for which I record) are interested in supporting art rather than just making money, almost like a modern form of patronage.

The Haydn 2032 project has drawn some interesting connections between Haydn and other composers…did you curate all the programmes yourself?

I programmed the first three albums on my own, then musicologists came in to help. Usually there’s one symphony which inspires me to think in certain directions, and the musicologists often come up with excellent suggestions to support that.

Unfortunately for the musicologists I’m someone who works best at the last minute - I need a sense of urgency, and it’s only at the eleventh hour that the ideas finally come! I know that isn’t great for the people who have to schedule these things, and it’s not always easy for me either…

I like a project where I can establish relationships across very different repertoire - One of our recent Haydn recordings was the Trauersinfonie, and in concert we also performed Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine and Samuel Scheidt’s Paduan dolorosa. Unfortunately there wasn’t space for the Scheidt on the CD, but the effect was incredible: three different styles and eras, all on the same emotional page. Music is music, and building a programme is about having the taste and instinct to sense what could work well together.

What sort of forces have you employed for the project?

It’s quite variable, but with Il Giardino Armonico we generally record with a string section of 4-4-3-2-2 which is similar to what Haydn had in Eisenstadt. With the Kammerorchester Basel we have a slightly bigger group, and for the last project we put both orchestras together because we wanted to have the same size band that Haydn had when he did the symphonies in London. The atmosphere is just lovely, and next year we’ll do a second volume of London symphonies with them both.

There’s a Haydn foundation in Basel which has invested a lot of money in the project, and it’s such a luxurious way to work. We have three-and-a-half days of rehearsals, then two concerts followed by five full days of recording! The studio becomes a laboratory where we can investigate and experiment. 

And the recording process itself is different: I ask the engineer to put speakers in the hall so that the whole orchestra can listen back with me and think about what worked and what was less successful. It’s ultimately my responsibility as a conductor, but I like the musicians to have direct access to what we did because they each bring so much to the table. It’s not quite democratic, but it’s about recognising the capacity of your colleagues - listening back together often illustrates something that would take me a thousand words to explain.

What’s planned to mark the culmination of the project in 2032?

People say we have to do something special, but I haven’t thought that far ahead! I’m more interested in the process than the end result, which is probably why I prefer rehearsals to concerts. Maybe we’ll perform a marathon of all 107 symphonies non-stop with three orchestras and people sleeping in shifts!