Gardiner conducts Haydn's sonic garden with The Constellations Orchestra

On a spring evening in Zaragoza, conductor John Eliot Gardiner brought The Constellations Orchestra to the Auditorio to close the Ibermúsica 2025-26 season with a performance of Haydn's symphonies on period instruments. The occasion was more than a concert — it was a quiet argument, made through sound, that fidelity to a composer's original world is itself a form of understanding. Gardiner, now in his eighties, has spent a lifetime insisting that the instruments matter as much as the notes, and that to hear Haydn as Haydn heard himself is to encounter something still alive.