Roger Norrington: a maverick, an irresistible firebrand and a musical visionary

The Guardian

7 days ago

The conductor Sir Roger Norrington, whose death was announced yesterday at the age of 91, remains still the maverick presence that classical music needs. His mission wasn't only to make us hear the repertoire we thought it knew through the prism of the techniques and playing styles of its time, rather than the ossifications of later traditions. He was also an irresistible firebrand in performance, whose energy wasn't only about inspiring his performers to get closer to the music they were playing, it was also an invitation to his audiences that their listening should be involved too. Norrington wanted everyone to feel the urgency of Beethoven's rhetorical power and rudeness, from the radiance of one of his favourite pieces, the Missa Solemnis, to the emetic contrabassoon in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, which was always the richest of raspberries in his performances and recordings.
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Haydn's symphonies, particularly, were pieces of participative performance art in Norrington's hands, in which his delight in sharing the radical humour and jaw-dropping discontinuities of the music was so evident. The conductor would turn round to his listeners - especially in the Prommers in the arena of the Royal Albert Hall in one of his 42 appearances at the Proms - to make sure we all realised just how weird and wonderful this music really was.
The revelations of hearing Norrington's historically informed musical mission in action defined an era, along with his fellow iconoclasts, such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, all of whom founded ensembles of period instruments, like Norrington's London Classical Players, and took the lessons they had learnt therein to transform the sound world of modern instrument orchestras. Norrington's work with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra is the sound of his later legacy in action, in Brahms, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Elgar, as well as Beethoven and Mozart.
But Norrington's distinctiveness was his unshakeable belief that there was a right way to play Beethoven – and a wrong one. He was also completely committed to his idea that the curse of vibrato was an aberration in performances of all music composed before the early 20th century, whether Bach to Mahler. While his vibrato-free performances brought astonishing moments – listen to the opening of the slow movement of Bruckner's sixth symphony, and connected music from across the centuries, it was an experiment that didn't catch on.
Or at least it hasn't yet. Norrington's many crusades for the right tempo and textures in Beethoven's symphonies, for the clarity and directness of drama in Bach's Passions, for the transparency of sound world in Wagner and Debussy, have had repercussions across the whole of classical music, even with conductors and orchestras who might not think they're working under his influence. Norrington's decades-long mission to wean musical culture off the drug of vibrato may yet have its day.
And his work remains fresh and thrilling. His Beethoven recordings with the London Classical Players - all the symphonies, and the piano concertos with Melvyn Tan, from the 1980s - are as impishly radical as ever. The paradox of Norrington's performances is that what seemed like austerity and ideology was in fact a generous invitation to re-hear the incendiary meanings and power of music that had been taken for granted for too long.
Norrington was associated with what used to be called 'authenticity' in the performance of 17th, 18th, and 19th century repertoires. But he was too intelligent to believe that what he was doing was a mere restoration job or a return to a sound world of Mozart's or Beethoven's time - something that can never truly be recaptured. He wasn't a musician trying to return to the past. Instead he was going back to find a musical future. The sound of his recordings is the sound of the indelible imagination of all those composers he loved being released in all their rapier wit, sublimity and delirium into our time.