The Carpenters legend behind band's biggest hits dies as tributes pour in
His death occurred on May 17, but it has only now come to light, with the cause of death yet to be disclosed. Paul Williams, his songwriting comrade, broke the news on Instagram, penning a heartfelt tribute.
"The first song, Roger Nichols and I wrote was called 'It's hard to say goodbye...' Sadly, we hit the nail on the head. Roger Nichols passed away peacefully four days ago, at home with his beautiful family ...his wife Terry and the daughters he was so proud of, Claire and Caitlin at his side. They were his dream come true. His greatest joy," he shared.
Nichols and Williams crafted a legacy of hits for The Carpenters, including timeless classics like We've Only Just Begun, Rainy Days and Mondays, and I Won't Last a Day Without You, also enchanting the likes of Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Petula Clark, Jackie DeShannon, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, and The Monkees with their compositions, reports the Express.
Claire, Roger's daughter, also took to Instagram to honour her father, expressing: "My mom, Terri, and my sisters, Caroline and Caitlin, are all so proud of the man he was, and are in awe of the legacy he leaves."
Fans have been pouring out their hearts with tributes as they grapple with the news. "Rainy Days and Mondays, We've Only Just Begun, I Won't Last a Day... Your partnership left a mark, forever. Men like he an you are gifted with one of the most rare circumstences in a human life: inmortality through art. Each time one of your records spins, he'll live again somehow. All souls las forever (I've heard it somewhere...) Love and gratitude," one fan expressed.
"My sympathies! Roger, I felt never got all the recognition for his work as he should've. It feels like there's too many songwriters out there who the general public doesn't know because their songs are performed by the well known singers and bands. I have a number of records with the names 'Roger Nichols - Paul Williams' and they make me smile quite often. Thoughts and prayers to Roger and his family/friends," another shared.
"This is not the news I wanted to wake up to. I have long considered Roger a genius and the two of you to be one of the greatest songwriting teams ever...PERIOD. There's nothing like discovering yet another perfect little Roger Nichols-Paul Williams gem I hadn't heard before. Thank you both endlessly and RIP to Roger. I'm glad to be among the 'small circle of friends' who understand all that he brought to the world," lamented a third admirer.
A fourth fan lamented: "RIP. I was just singing I Won't Last a Day Without You. Such a beautiful song." Another added their condolences, saying: "So sorry to hear this. He wrote some amazing songs with and without Paul Williams."
Meanwhile, another expressed their sorrow: "Very sad to hear this news. I was truly a fan of Roger's. Love and Mercy." One of his most iconic tunes, We've Only Just Begun, started off as a simple jingle for a Crocker Bank advert. The songwriting duo Roger and Paul were tasked with penning the tune after a bank exec stumbled upon Roger's album, leading to its creation in just a few hours right before the deadline.
Richard Carpenter spotted the song's potential after hearing it on the telly. His band, The Carpenters, went on to record their own rendition, which soared to success in late 1970.
The track not only snagged a Grammy Award nomination for Song of the Year but also made it onto BMI's million performances list and bagged an accolade for a million sales in sheet music.
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The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
Sir Roger Norrington obituary
Roger Norrington, who has died aged 91, was one of the great pioneers of the early music revival. With his acute sense of cultural history and performance tradition, he was one of a handful of conductors who radically redefined the realisation of music of earlier periods. Launching his career with the Schütz Choir, dedicated to the promulgation of the 17th-century German master Heinrich Schütz, he gave attention to principles of performance practice. Similar principles were then applied to the classical repertoire when he founded the London Classical Players in 1978, though gradually the ensemble encroached on later and later repertoire, bringing historical informed performance to music of the 20th century. 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His musical activities were of an amateur nature: singing, playing and a little conducting. Then, in 1962, came the landmark London concert with the Schütz Chorale, which he had just formed along with the amateur Heinrich Schütz Choir. (The chorus was relaunched in 1972 as the Schütz Choir of London, later tackling 19th-century and contemporary music.) So successful was that 1962 concert that after a six-month secondment to Africa on behalf of OUP, he decided to devote his career to music. At the Royal College of Music in London, he studied conducting under Sir Adrian Boult, percussion, composition and the history of the orchestra. From 1969 to 1984 he was musical director of Kent Opera, bringing stylistic acumen and flair to an extensive repertoire – 30 different works, ranging from Monteverdi (including his own edition of L'incoronazione di Poppea) to Britten and Tippett. He also undertook engagements at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, English National Opera and many houses in mainland Europe. In 1978 he founded the London Classical Players, remaining its musical director until it was disbanded in 1997. These were to prove years of trailblazing musical discovery. One major enterprise was the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies recorded for EMI (1987–92). For Norrington the crucial aspects of their performance were not pitch or orchestral size, but tempi, note-lengths, bowing and phrasing. His concern for Beethoven's own metronome markings – a preoccupation that was to become an article of faith – led to sometimes hair-raisingly swift tempi, but there was no denying the drama he brought to these works. In the Ninth Symphony he was determined to confront the paralysing monumentality of the late Romantic tradition, restoring the work to the 'human, quicksilver thought-world of the classical period'. Sonority was as important here as tempo: the timpani, beaten with hard sticks, should sound 'as if they have come straight from the field of Waterloo', in Norrington's vivid phrase. Another major project was the recording, also for EMI, of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1991). Firmly grounding the conception in the tradition of 18th-century Singspiel, Norrington was intent on replacing all pomp and pretension with an approach that was humorous and specifically lightweight. Thus the singers chosen were young, light and agile, and a modest-sized chamber orchestra, gentler in timbre than is the norm today, was positioned in such a way as to encourage a close rapport with the singers, the conductor (Norrington) seated in the middle of the orchestral forces as a member of the team. Tempi were fleet, with easy Andantes, liberating the dance and folksong inspiration of the work. In 1985 Norrington inaugurated an occasional series of weekend 'experiences', examining the interpretation and performance of a particular composer in depth through concerts, lectures, panel discussions and exhibitions. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms were among the composers illuminatingly treated. As the London Classical Players progressed through the 19th century, so the principles of historically informed practice cast revealing new light on Romantic repertoire. If Norrington's renderings of the Preludes to Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger – the former a flowing two-in-a bar, the latter a brisk canter to undermine all pomp and pretension – raised Wagnerian eyebrows, each interpretation was founded on historical evidence. That indeed was always Norrington's yardstick. His practice was to establish the composer's intention and then find a musical way of realising it. It was an approach that could lead to dogmatism, but more often to thrilling artistic experiences. His work with modern-instrument orchestras, notably with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (principal conductor 1998–2011, returning in 2016 to conduct the orchestra's final concert, at the BBC Proms) and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (chief conductor 2011–16), took the battle into new territory. The most controversial topic proved to be that of vibrato, to which Norrington developed an ideological, almost pathological aversion. Arguing that vibrato was applied systematically in orchestral playing only in the 1930s, he exhorted orchestras to desist. While the furore over the notion of Land of Hope and Glory being delivered with no vibrato when he conducted the Last Night of the Proms in 2008 had an element of manufactured alarm – Norrington denied that he had ever advocated it – there was a somehow symbolic sense of a last bastion being stormed. 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And yet some of the later performances lacked the earlier drive. Not that in intellectual terms he became any less messianic. He referred to his non-vibrato campaign as his 'last hand grenade', typically advocating it not because it was authentic but because it made the music, in his opinion, more 'beautiful, expressive and exciting'. In a 2007 interview when his recording of Mahler's Second Symphony with his Stuttgart orchestra was released he asserted: '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.' In matters of vibrato the world has not yet come round to universal acceptance of his ideas. But Norrington will be remembered for his groundbreaking initiatives and truly radical spirit: as a man who helped change received ideas about the performance of music. In 1964 he married Susan McLean May, and they had two children, Ben and Amy. They divorced in 1982, and four years later he married the choreographer Kay Lawrence, with whom he had another son, Tom. Kay died last year, and he is survived by his children. Roger Arthur Carver Norrington, conductor, born 16 March 1934; died 18 July 2025
The Guardian
7 days ago
- The Guardian
Pioneering period instrument performances: Five key Roger Norrington recordings
It's hard to think of another conductor of recent times who has polarised opinion more sharply than Roger Norrington. On one side were those who admired his indefatigable research into 18th- and 19th-century performance practice, and the ways in which he deployed the results in his work with the period instruments of the London Classical Players, often extending the idea of historically informed performance beyond its then restricted field of the classical era into the orchestral music of Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms and Wagner. On the other side were those who viewed Norrington's 'experiments' as at best eccentric and at worst as profoundly destructive, especially when he carried over those ideas, such as his hatred of string vibrato, into his work with the many traditional symphony orchestras that he conducted throughout his career. Both those aspects of his conducting life are well represented in the many recordings – well over 100 - that Norrington made. Another significant aspect of his work, as an opera conductor (especially in the 1970s and early 1980s with Britain's first regional opera company, Kent Opera, of which he was the founding music director) is less well represented however and in this selection of Norrington's recordings, the Don Giovanni, a later product, has to stand for that important contribution. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony – London Classical Players (1987) Norrington's cycle of Beethoven's symphonies, overtures and concertos, all recorded on the period instruments of the London Classical Players is perhaps the best known of all his recording ventures. Wagner Overtures - London Classical Players (1990) Even today period-instrument performances of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler are not exactly commonplace, but when Norrington made his pioneering recordings in the 1990s they really were unexplored territory. Mozart's Don Giovanni – London Classical Players (1993) Norrington's two Mozart sets with the London Classical Players – this Don Giovanni and a Zauberflöte released the following year, were very much trail-blazers when they were recorded over three decades ago. Vaughan Williams's London Symphony – London Philharmonic Orchestra (2000) British music was another of Norrington's enthusiasms, and his cycle of the Vaughan Williams symphonies, as well as recordings of Elgar, were much admired. Mahler's Symphony No 5 – SWR Radio Symphony Stuttgart (2006) From 1998 to 2011 Norrington was principal conductor of the Stuttgart Radio orchestra, and made a whole range of recordings of mainstream repertoire with it, including a complete Mahler cycle. Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique – Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (2013) The London Classical Players were dissolved in 1997 and its dates taken over by the OAE, with which Norrington continued to appear occasionally until he retired in 2021.
