Acclaimed conductor, Sir Roger Norrington, dies aged 91

Australia Broadcast Center

5 days ago

Sir Roger Norrington, the trail-blazing pioneer of the early music movement, died last week aged 91.
He had one of the biggest impacts on classical music of any conductor of his generation.
With ensembles these days regularly getting standing ovations for concerts on original instruments, it's easy to forget how far the music world has evolved in terms of audience acceptance, even reverence for historically informed performance thanks to radical innovators like Norrington.
When he first began evangelising for "authentic" performances of baroque music in the 1960s — rearranging orchestras on stage, thinning the strings down to the numbers composers wrote for and all playing on gut strings without vibrato — many of his musical colleagues and critics were outraged.
But Norrington persevered with forensic scholarship and an evangelistic fervour, taking his almost pathological aversion to vibrato into the realm of modern-instrument orchestras.
One of his favourite chapters in his musical journey, he said, was working for 15 years with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony orchestra.
During his time as principal conductor from 1998, he created "the Stuttgart sound"; what he believed was a near-perfect synthesis of historically informed music-making with the means of a modern and flexible orchestra.
When they played Elgar's first symphony at the BBC Proms in 2008 without vibrato, critics said he'd gone too far.
However, Norrington argued orchestras in Elgar's time played with much less vibrato than they do today.
When he conducted the traditional encore of Land of Hope and Glory on the Last Night without vibrato, he asked the audience with his customary wry humour: "Can you sing with a bit more vibrato, please?"
Audiences loved him.
As Norrington pointed out to anyone who would listen: "The fact is orchestras didn't generally use vibrato until the 1930s. It is a fashion, like smoking, which came in at about the same time. Smoking has gone, so maybe vibrato will too."
These days Norrington's brisk tempi, his scholarly, historically focused approach and what he loved calling "pure tone" are the norm, and he had much to celebrate in his last years.
He has left behind a rich legacy of thousands of concerts world-wide and more than 150 recordings.
Beyond his revolutionary impact on early music, with the Heinrich Schütz Choir he founded in the 1960s, and later his long-running London Classical Players (1978-97) which morphed into the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Norrington extended the concept of "period performance" to music of the 18th and 19th centuries.
When he lapped at the door of 20th century music and shared his expertise with non-period instrument symphony orchestras, the musicians would say: "We've come for a detox, maestro."
Norrington was unorthodox from day one, but always a team player. If you look at some of his concerts on YouTube, you'll see he usually conducted in rehearsals and concerts from a swivelling office chair; often chatting to the audience and encouraging them to clap between movements.
"You are part of the team," he insisted. Part of his secret was bringing irrepressible joy to his music making.
His aim, he always said, "is to re-create as best as possible, the original sound the composers would have heard; to honour their intentions".
To that end, he always tried to disseminate his scholarly findings in revelatory liner notes on his recordings and "Experience Weekends".
In these early outreach, total immersion programs — part marathon concert and part musicological seminar — he'd focus on a single major work or composer with performances backed up by lectures and open rehearsals.
In 1991 Norrington was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. After surgery, doctors gave him months, then weeks to live.
He began to say his goodbyes.
Then he discovered an unconventional New York cancer doctor and, although he had to take a lot of medication, made a miraculous recovery.
In 2021, he announced his intention to retire, giving a "no fuss" all-Haydn concert as his swan song outside London, at the Sage music venue near Newcastle in the north of England, with the Royal Northern Sinfonia.
When asked if he'd be writing his memoirs next, he replied: "For my family only. No, I am not that interesting."
Norrington was born into a musical family in 1934. His parents met while both were performing in a Gilbert and Sullivan amateur production. His father was President of Trinity College, Oxford, and inventor of the Norrington Table — the unofficial college listings according to academic success!
Norrington learnt violin, sang as a boy soprano and later as a tenor after the family returned home to Oxford when he was 10. They evacuated to Canada during the war.
"I found these musty old records. Some of the Beethoven was a bit difficult at first, but the Bach Brandenburg No. 6 was wonderful," he said.
"I played it a hundred times a day. If this was so-called serious music, then it was for me."
But he thought, like his parents, that he would spend his life making music in his spare time.
He initially read English literature at Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar, and then took a job at Oxford University Press, where he published religious books.
Just as the English language has changed since 1800, he argued, so had the language of music.
Although he sang and played in orchestras and quartets in his spare time, and saw conductors like Colin Davis, Giulini and Furtwängler in action, it wasn't until Norrington was 28 that he decided to take music more seriously, founding his Schütz choir.
He was inspired by a new publication of the 17th century composer's church music that was virtually unknown, so there was no modern performing tradition. Their first London concert sparked a sensation.
At that concert was the principal of the Royal College of Music, who offered him a place.
Norrington then found himself studying conducting with Adrian Boult, learning composition and music history, however he bemusedly recalled he didn't have to do exams.
"I don't even have grade one recorder," he said.
In 1969 Norrington became the first director of Kent Opera, cutting his teeth in every production the company staged for more than a decade.
Few associate him with opera but he has conducted more than 500 opera performances and made many recordings too. His approach was always to create everything afresh by going back to the sources and presenting the work as though it was a premiere.
Before he retired, Norrington was asked about his extraordinary longevity and relationships with musicians.
"I've always tried to earn rather than command respect," he said. "When you're older they're all younger than you and they think: 'Well, he must be good — he's been around such a long time, I had his records when I was 16!'"
When he conducted the Last Night of the Proms concert in 2008, Norrington spoke movingly to the audience about what music meant to him.
Get the latest classical music stories direct to your inbox