Biography
Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877–1950) was an English musician, composer, and teacher. Between his conventional education at Charterhouse School and New College, Oxford, where he obtained only a pass degree, Gardiner was a piano student at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main where he was taught by Knorr and Uzielli, who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann. He belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who studied at the Hoch Conservatory in the late 1890s. Gardiner taught music briefly at Winchester College (1907), collected English folk music (1905-1906), and composed. His works included compositions in a variety of genres, including two symphonies, but many of his scores are lost and only a very limited amount of his music survives.
His best-known work Evening Hymn (or Te lucis ante terminum) (1908) is a lush, romantic work for 8 part choir and organ, of dense harmonies. For most of the time, it sits in four parts, though the Treble, Alto, Tenor and Bass parts all sub-divide at various points during its duration. It is not explicitly eight part though, such as Charles Woods' 'Hail Gladdening Light' arrangement from a similar time period. It is considered a classic of the English choral repertoire. It is still regularly performed as an anthem at evensong in Anglican churches.
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The fame of this work has overshadowed his surviving orchestral works, which include Overture to a Comedy and the Delius-like A Berkshire Idyll.
Gardiner's most important work, arguably, was his promotion as a conductor of contemporary British composers, notably in a series of concerts at Queen's Hall London in 1912-1913. The composers represented included Bax, Austin, Holst, Grainger, Quilter, Scott and Norman O'Neill. (The last four had also studied with him at Frankfurt.) He financed these concerts himself; he continued to be notably generous with his personal fortune, paying for a private benefit performance of The Planets for Gustav Holst in 1918, and purchasing Delius's house at Grez-sur-Loing to enable him to continue living in it at the end of his life.
Gardiner gave up composing in 1925 largely because he was intensely self-critical: much of his lost music was probably destroyed by him. Thereafter, he devoted himself to a pioneering afforestation programme on his Dorset farm.
He was the great uncle of the prominent conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.