Having begun his musical path as a performer of Baroque recorder and flute repertoire, Giovanni Antonini took on the role of directing the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, extending historically informed practices to a broader range that reached into the nineteenth century with various orchestras.
Born in Milan in 1965, Antonini pursued flute studies at the Civica Scuola di Musica before developing a focus on the recorder and period-informed interpretation at the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, an early institutional program of its kind. In 1985 he joined fellow students to establish the Baroque orchestra Il Giardino Armonico, with the goal of expanding familiarity with authentic performance conventions; he quickly assumed leadership and commenced conducting the ensemble in 1989. The group toured extensively under his guidance and partnered with specialists such as Christophe Coin and Giuliano Carmignola as well as artists outside the historical-performance sphere, including Katia and Marielle Labèque and Viktoria Mullova. A sequence of well-received Teldec releases centered on Vivaldi and Bach during the 1990s and early 2000s elevated the ensemble’s standing, leaving it among the small number of early-music groups that remained active into the 2010s. The orchestra’s discography opened with a 1994 Teldec Das Alte Werk account of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; the 2000 Vivaldi Album recorded with Cecilia Bartoli received a Grammy Award, while Antonini himself collected multiple ECHO Klassik prizes and additional distinctions.
During the 2000s Antonini began leading nineteenth-century repertoire, frequently drawing on perspectives derived from Baroque practice, which led to guest engagements with numerous independent ensembles. Although many of his symphonic recordings involved the Basel Chamber Orchestra, he also directed the Berlin Philharmonic on an invitation from Simon Rattle and appeared with other prominent European and North American orchestras, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In the same decades he established himself as an operatic conductor, presenting Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro with the La Scala company in his native city and leading a new production of Bellini’s Norma featuring Bartoli together with Il Giardino Armonico; in 2019 he conducted Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the same house.
Antonini’s energies in the 2010s and 2020s centered on extensive recording initiatives devoted to Classical-era instrumental works. These included a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Basel Chamber Orchestra for Sony Classical and the ongoing “Haydn 2032” series, realized alternately with that orchestra and Il Giardino Armonico, in which Haydn symphonies are juxtaposed with lesser-known pieces by his contemporaries. His output grew steadily more abundant; in 2020 alone he released four albums, comprising two installments of the “Haydn 2032” project and two Alpha discs—one a collection of Vivaldi flute concertos that he both played and directed, the other the exploratory What’s Next Vivaldi? with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Further volumes in the Haydn series continued to appear through the mid-2020s, and in 2023 Antonini and Il Giardino Armonico supported mandolinist Avi Avital on the Deutsche Grammophon release Concertos. The year 2024 brought his participation in Bartoli’s Casta Diva, by which point his recorded catalog had reached roughly 125 entries.
