Il Giardino Armonico is an award-winning period-instrument ensemble specializing in Baroque music. The ensemble has teamed with top soloists in concert and on recordings, and is the orchestra for many historical performance operas. Beginning in 2014, in an effort to record a complete cycle of Haydn's symphonies by 2032 (the 300th anniversary year of the composer's birth), Il Giardino Armonico launched the Haydn2032 project on the Alpha label. Two volumes of this cycle were issued in 2021.

Il Giardino Armonico was founded in Milan in 1985 by Giovanni Antonini, who has served as the ensemble's conductor since 1989. With a flexible membership depending on the repertoire being performed, Il Giardino Armonico is able to perform chamber, symphonic, and operatic repertoire from the 17th and 18th centuries. The ensemble is a frequent guest at festivals and concert halls around the world. It has performed many of the operas by Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Handel, including a 2012 Salzburg run with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli of Handel's Giulio Cesare. Il Giardino Armonico has performed with an esteemed list of soloists, including cellist Christophe Coin, violinist Viktoria Mullova, and pianist duo Katia and Marielle Labèque.

Il Giardino Armonico is perhaps best known for its extensive, award-winning recording catalog, which began with the 1989 Nuova Era album Vivaldi: Concerti di Camera. Signed to an exclusive deal with the Teldec label in 1991, Il Giardino Armonico gained wide recognition from audiences and critics alike. The group has earned all of the major recording awards, including 13 Diapason d’Or awards, four Gramophone awards, and a Grammy Award for The Vivaldi Album, with Bartoli. Signing with the Alpha label, Il Giardino Armonico began its Haydn2032 series in 2014 with La Passione. The ensemble teamed with Bartoli again in 2019 for the album Farinelli, which garnered a Grammy nomination. Volumes nine (L'Addio) and ten (Les Heures du Jour) of the Haydn2032 series were issued in 2021. ~ Keith Finke

Building on a career as a Baroque recorder player and flutist, Giovanni Antonini became the conductor of the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico. With that group and others, he has applied historical-performance practices to repertory extending into the Romantic era.

Antonini was born in 1965 in Milan. He studied the flute at the Civica Scuola di Musica and became interested in the recorder and in historical performance at the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, one of the first generation of programs in the field. He and a group of other students formed the Baroque orchestra Il Giardino Armonico in 1985, aiming to broaden awareness of historically informed performance practices. Antonini emerged as a leader of the group and began to conduct it in 1989. Under his direction, the group has concertized widely and collaborated with artists from both the historical-performance field (Christophe Coin, Giuliano Carmignola) and the mainstream (Katia and Marielle Labèque, Viktoria Mullova). A series of successful recordings on the Teldec label in the 1990s and early 2000s, specializing in Vivaldi and Bach, raised the group's profile, and by the 2010s, it was among the few early historical-performance ensembles that had continued to flourish. The Vivaldi Album (2000), with Cecilia Bartoli, earned a Grammy Award, and Antonini has won several ECHO Klassik awards and a variety of other honors.

Around 2005, Antonini began to conduct 19th century repertory as well, often applying insights gained from Baroque performance. This has gained him invitations to conduct various outside groups. Many of his recordings of symphonic repertory have been with the Basel Chamber Orchestra in Switzerland, but he has also led the Berlin Philharmonic (at the invitation of Simon Rattle) and many other major orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In the 2000s and 2010s, Antonini has emerged as an important operatic conductor, leading Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the La Scala company in his hometown as well as performances of Bellini's Norma (in a new version), starring Bartoli, with Il Giardino Armonico. In 2019, Antonini conducted Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at La Scala.

Many of Antonini's efforts in the 2010s have been absorbed by large recording projects for Classical-period instrumental music, including complete cycles of Beethoven's symphonies with the Basel Chamber Orchestra for the Sony Classical label and a new "Haydn 2032" project with the same group, pairing Haydn's symphonies with little-known works by his contemporaries. Antonini has grown more and more prolific as his career proceeds. In 2020 alone, he issued four new albums, including two in the "Haydn 2032" series and two albums for the Alpha label, one, a set of Vivaldi flute concertos where he played and conducted, and the other, the experimental What's Next Vivaldi?, featuring violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. ~ James Manheim