glad I did it. It was a real eye-opener.”
Gardiner’s redemption arc is far from complete. He knows this. “Can I guarantee that another loss of temper won’t happen? No, I can’t,” he says. “But I feel that I am in a position where I can have strategies to deal with it.”
He hopes to conduct again. “The repertory that I love, I can’t live without,” he says. “I want to be able to share that with audiences.”
But for now, he is at peace with his forced retirement from the Monteverdi. “I felt that I’d been given a fair crack of the whip,” he says. “I can’t say I was treated unfairly.”
And with that, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, one of the giants of classical music, stands up and bids me farewell, a man still searching for his place in a world that has changed around him.