Sir Roger Norrington obituary

The Guardian

20-07-2025

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.
More recently Norrington worked with modern ensembles such as the Orchestra of St Luke's (in New York), the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, and occasionally the Vienna Philharmonic, exhorting them to adopt the principles, if not the instruments, of the period with regard to the music they played. It is a measure of his success that much of what originally seemed controversial is now taken for granted.
Born in Oxford, Roger was the son of Edith (nee Carver) and Sir Arthur Norrington, the vice-chancellor responsible for the Norrington league table of Oxford colleges, and began his studies at the Dragon school in the city, where he took the lead role in a production of Iolanthe, and Westminster school, London.
After national service as an RAF fighter controller in Bournemouth, he studied English at Clare College, Cambridge (1954-57), subsequently taking a job at Oxford University Press publishing religious books. 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.
Knighted in 1997, Norrington lived near Newbury, Berkshire, moving in 2014 to Exeter, Devon. He took his final bow as a conductor in 2021 with the Royal Northern Sinfonia at the Sage Gateshead (now The Glasshouse), making his final recordings, of Mozart's five violin concertos, with Francesca Dego, in 2019 and 2021 (released 2021-22).
The last years of his life were, however, overshadowed by illness. In the early 90s Norrington was diagnosed with skin cancer and a brain tumour. With the help of an American specialist the malady was kept under control, but the physical strain and heavy medication left their mark. Where he had been in earlier years a dynamic, athletic presence on the podium, he mellowed into a leisurely facilitator. True, the collegial approach had always been central to Norrington's aesthetic. The tyrannical figure of the conductor, embodied in, say, Toscanini or Fritz Reiner, was long banished in favour of a creative fellowship of like-minded individuals.
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