Roger Norrington, iconoclastic British conductor, dies at 91

Boston Globe

5 days ago

He led both period-instrument and modern orchestras, using the same interpretive principles, and though some of his performances drew criticism for their brash iconoclasm, many listeners regarded them as insightful and refreshingly original.
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'As ever, with his highly idiosyncratic conducting style, one gets, in addition to a Haydn symphony, the Roger Norrington show,' Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler wrote in a review of a Handel and Haydn Society's performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 44 in 2008. 'He seems to delight in exuding his own personality at the orchestra through the medium of the music.'
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Mr. Norrington served as an artistic director of the Handel and Hayden Society from 2006 to 2009. 'The organization feels more interesting when he's around,' Eichler wrote.
Lanky, bespectacled, bearded and balding, Mr. Norrington projected both affability and authority, and he loved making the case for his ideas -- not only in interviews but also in seemingly off-the-cuff comments at his concerts. He often cited centuries-old treatises as well as his delight in the 'pure' sound, as he put it, of strings playing without vibrato. He once famously referred to vibrato as 'a modern drug.'
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'It's not about consecrating a sacred object,' Mr. Norrington said about conducting. 'It's about exploring and being curious and having fun.'
Rachel Papo/The New York Times
Stu Rosner
Stu Rosner
Toward the end of his career, he preferred to conduct while seated, usually on a high swivel chair that allowed him to turn to the audience to smile conspiratorially at a light moment within the music, and even to encourage applause. He was known to tell audiences that they could applaud between the movements of a symphony or a concerto, a common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries that is frowned on today.
He reveled in being provocative. In a 2021 interview with The Telegraph, he referred to his 2007 recording of Mahler's Second Symphony as his 'last hand grenade.'
International fame came late to Mr. Norrington. He had built a solid reputation as a choral conductor in the 1970s, when he made a series of well-received recordings with the Heinrich Schütz Choir, an amateur group he formed in 1962 and named after the German baroque composer. He was also the founding music director of the Kent Opera, England's first regional opera company, established by singer Norman Platt in 1969.
Yet he was scarcely known outside Britain until 1987, when he released revelatory recordings of the Beethoven Second and Eighth symphonies. They were the first installments of a complete cycle with the London Classical Players, a period-instrument ensemble that Mr. Norrington founded in 1978 and led until 1997.
'I was happy to take things slowly,' he told The Telegraph in 2021. 'I didn't conduct a Beethoven symphony until I was 50. So when I finally stood up in front of the great orchestras of America and Europe as a guest conductor, I actually knew what I wanted. And this meant I could relax and treat music-making as something that is full of love and laughter.
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'It's not about consecrating a sacred object,' he continued. 'It's about exploring and being curious and having fun.'
Mr. Norrington's first Beethoven recordings were striking in their adherence to the composer's metronome markings, which most conductors have considered impossibly fast or, in a few cases, impractically slow. The recordings immediately found a large audience, and by the time the cycle was complete, in 1989, Mr. Norrington's career was white hot.
Roger Arthur Carver Norrington was born in Oxford, England, on March 16, 1934. His father, Arthur Norrington, worked for Oxford University Press and later became president of Trinity College, Oxford, and the vice chancellor of the University of Oxford. Roger's mother, Edith Joyce (Carver) Norrington, was a gifted amateur pianist.
Roger studied the violin as a child and sang in choirs as a boy soprano. When he auditioned for a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Iolanthe,' he won the lead role.
'I realized I had some sort of gift,' he told The Guardian in 2007. But, he added, 'I thought I would be like my parents and spend my life doing music in my spare time.'
When he entered Clare College, Cambridge, after completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, it was to study English literature. Nevertheless, he performed with -- and, in his final year, conducted -- student ensembles.
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After graduating, Mr. Norrington became an editor at Oxford University Press. But he continued to sing in choirs and to play violin in orchestras and chamber groups. When a new edition of choral works by Heinrich Schütz was published in 1962, he became so eager to conduct the music that he formed the Heinrich Schütz Choir.
Despite the choir's name, its repertoire extended from the Renaissance through the 20th century, and it quickly won enthusiastic reviews and a following.
It was not until Oxford sent him on a six-month posting to Nairobi, Kenya, late in 1962 that he resolved to devote himself fully to music. When he returned to Britain, he left his job and enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied composition, music history and conducting (with Adrian Boult) and played percussion in the orchestra.
Recordings by Austrian period-instrument specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt led Mr. Norrington to reconsider his ideas about conducting and orchestral sound. They also inspired him to read treatises by 17th- and 18th-century musicians and to seek out musicologists such as Thurston Dart, who shaped his ideas about the performance of early music.
Norrington's success with the Schütz Choir led to his appointment as music director of the Kent Opera in 1969.
In 1986, he established the Early Opera Group with choreographer Kay Lawrence. He and Lawrence married that year. A previous marriage, to Susan McLean May, ended in divorce in 1982.
After his Beethoven recordings won him a large international audience, Mr. Norrington began performing regularly in the United States. He made his New York debut in 1989 at Carnegie Hall, leading the Orchestra of St. Luke's, a modern-instruments orchestra. Writing in The New York Times, Will Crutchfield described his performance of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony as 'exhilarating, witty, precise, full of verve and subtlety, fully convincing as to tempo (using Beethoven's markings with some modification for practicality's sake, rather than throwing them out as most conductors do) and wonderfully played.'
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In addition to novel tempos and the absence of vibrato, Mr. Norrington considered a balance of intuition and scholarship essential to his interpretations. He rebelled against the notion that one could re-create historical performance styles by merely playing what was written on the page. And he inveighed against those who treated performances as museum pieces.
'A performance is for now, and one instinctively tailors it for today,' he said in 1989, adding, 'To say that you don't put your personality into it is rubbish.'
In November 2021, after Mr. Norrington conducted his farewell concert -- leading the Royal Northern Sinfonia, in northern England, in an all-Haydn concert -- The Guardian called him 'arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century.'
Kay Lawrence died in November. Mr. Norrington leaves his son, Thomas; two children from his marriage to May, Ben and Amy Norrington; three grandchildren; a sister, Pippa Sandford; and a brother, Humphrey.
'My story, from 1962, has been one of knocking down wall after wall and seeing what happened,' Mr. Norrington told The Guardian in 2007. 'So to discover right at the end that these great traditional European and American orchestras can be part of it as well has been wonderful. Now even they are beginning to realize you don't need to put vibrato on everything, like sugar.'
He added: 'So if, on the day I die, the world is playing without vibrato, of course I will be delighted. But even if they aren't, I'll still be delighted because at least I did.'
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