by the Melos Chorus
First chapter of a four-part portrait. The recorder, Milan, and an ensemble born as a trio that forty years later plays from Europe to Australia.
Milan, 1965. Giovanni Antonini is born in the city where he still lives, and there he does his musical studies, at the Civica Scuola di Musica. The instrument that takes him into early music is the recorder, and the spark comes from a record player: the recordings of Frans Brüggen, the Dutch recorder player who in the 1960s and 1970s had restored the recorder to the rank of solo instrument. “The recorder changed me,” Antonini told Music Paper.
After Milan came the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, where he continued his training in the years when a generation of European musicians was rethinking from scratch the way to play Bach, Vivaldi and Corelli. Meanwhile his own city offered opportunities that Antonini remembers precisely: the concerts of the “Musica e poesia” season at San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, which left him, in his own words, “a sense of surprise and discovery.”
In 1985 Il Giardino Armonico was a trio: recorder and basso continuo.
Il Giardino Armonico was born in Milan in 1985. “We started out as a small trio: recorder and basso continuo,” Antonini recalls. The founders are he on recorder, Paolo Beschi on cello and Lorenzo Ghielmi on organ; soon after, the lutenist Luca Pianca joined. Since 1989 Antonini has directed the ensemble, and since then he has stepped onto the stage in two roles, as conductor and as soloist on the recorder and the Baroque transverse flute.
The group grew quickly and found a sound that Europe recognized at once. According to Antonini, what set those young Milanese apart from their Dutch and German colleagues was “a marked instinct for theatricality even in instrumental music.” The rest was done by rehearsals, many of them, “trying not to fall into a routine.” In forty years Il Giardino Armonico has never had sponsors or public funding, and its director calls it “almost a miracle.”
The map of its concerts widens from Europe to the United States and Canada, then to South America, Australia, Japan, Malaysia. In the 2025/26 season the ensemble is in residence at Wigmore Hall in London. Alongside them have played and sung Cecilia Bartoli, Isabelle Faust, Viktoria Mullova, Giuliano Carmignola, Sol Gabetta, Sumi Jo, Emmanuel Pahud, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Katia and Marielle Labèque. And Giovanni Sollima, who on 15 November will be on the same stage.
On tour he carries five or six flutes, and plays them in the evening, after rehearsals with the orchestra.
The conductor who now steps onto the podium of the Berlin Philharmonic and La Scala keeps practising like a student. On tour he takes five or six flutes with him and plays them every evening, once rehearsals are over. On method he has a clear idea, which explains why his Vivaldi and his Haydn sound so alive: “I think ‘philology’ is an overused word,” he has said, “seeking a historical truth is something unattainable.” The study of sources, for him, serves to keep the music open.
The second instalment of this portrait will tell of the records that made Il Giardino Armonico known around the world, from the 1994 Four Seasons to the Vivaldi Album with Cecilia Bartoli. The third will enter Haydn2032, the project with which Antonini is recording all of Haydn’s symphonies. The fourth will climb onto podiums and into opera houses, from Berlin to Salzburg.
On Sunday 15 November Giovanni Antonini conducts the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina in The Classical Rave Party, the evening that closes Romaeuropa Festival 2026 in the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. His daughter, Angelica Antonini, sings with him. On the morning of the same day, at 11:30 am, the 100 Cellos play. Tickets from 30 to 40 euros on TicketOne and Vivaticket.