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Boston Globe
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Roger Norrington, iconoclastic British conductor, dies at 91
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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up '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.' Advertisement 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.' Advertisement '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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A cutting history lesson from the BSO, and gorgeous imperfection from H+H
Friday afternoon featured a solid performance from the BSO, music director Andris Nelsons, and Latvian violinist Baiba Skride. The program was structurally balanced, and the juxtaposition of the two pieces made for an artfully delivered, poignant message about the whims of tyranny. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Symphony No. 8 was completed in 1943 and thus pre-dates the Violin Concerto by five years. The composer had already seen several friends and relatives sent to the Soviet Union's infamous gulags for alleged political crimes, and supposedly he kept a packed suitcase ready in case the secret police came for him. However, with the success of his patriotic Symphony No. 7, 'Leningrad', Shostakovich had rallied Soviet spirits and sustained his amicable official relationship with Party leadership, which he'd labored to repair after the 1936 denunciation of his opera ' Advertisement According to the program notes by Harlow Robinson, Symphony No. 8 was found insufficiently heroic by the Party officials, who craved unambiguous 'Socialist realist' musical praise of its ideologies, but the composer faced no immediate consequences. However, as Shostakovich worked on the Violin Concertoin 1948, he and other high profile Soviet composers were ordered to confess their 'mistakes' of writing music that failed to toe the Party line. The Violin Concerto's musical structure was already unorthodox, its affects alternately dark and brooding or grotesque, and it contained distinctly Jewish musical themes at a time when antisemitism was on the rise in the Soviet Union. Out of self-preservation, Shostakovich withheld the concerto from performance until after Stalin's death in 1953, and put bread on the table by writing unassailably Stalin-praising concert pieces and film scores. In the Handel and Haydn Society's program book later that day, musicologist Teresa Neff wrote that 'surely part of the magic of music lives in its ability to speak differently to each listener, and to the same listener in different ways.' Friday's BSO program demonstrated that that magic, more than any specific mode of musical expression, was surely what Stalin and his apparatchiks sought to quash. If music can speak differently to each listener, there's nothing to stop it from conveying ideas that threaten power. Skride, who will appear in Leipzig with the BSO, landed her bow on the strings for the violin concerto's sleepless Nocturne with the silent fluidity of an owl on the hunt, and the electrifying restlessness only intensified through the grotesque carnival of the Scherzo. Behind her, the large orchestra played like a tight band, the musical texture densely woven. The beginning of the third movement is one of the concerto's rare moments when the soloist does not play, and the BSO brass intoned the introduction with awesome weight, as if pronouncing judgement. Advertisement The soloist was sublime in the third movement's incendiary Passacaglia and the subsequent visceral cadenza, spiking the repeated musical ideas with mercurial accents and rhythms. The final Burlesque flagged by comparison. But that concerto is a marathon, and the cadenza is its Heartbreak Hill. Many a solid violinist has run low on gas around that point. She'll have another run at it in Leipzig. Symphony No. 8 bristled with lean intensity, and on the heels of the Violin Concerto the common points between the pieces were easy to hear. Abrupt textural and rhythmic shifts were plentiful, and the vicious circus conveyed by the second movement's militaristic march sounded quite familiar. Nelsons leaned into the final movement's fake-out, as it seemed to be building towards triumph (as the Party authorities would have expected) then swerved into quiet and uneasy reflection. More's the pity these pieces don't share a program in Leipzig; history sings in these notes. 06bso - Handel and Haydn Society artistic director Jonathan Cohen leading the orchestra at Symphony Hall. (Joseph Sedarski) Joseph Sedarski Later that day, in the same hall, the Handel and Haydn Society concluded its season with artistic director Jonathan Cohen on the podium and soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout at the fortepiano. The evening began with the society's teenage choruses performing Schubert's 'An die Sonne': a very difficult piece for young voices, and they made a heroic effort which Bezuidenhout gamely accompanied. Mozart's incidental music from the play 'Thamos, King of Egypt' was thoroughly entertaining, as was Haydn's Symphony No. 82, 'The Bear.' Perhaps anything would seem cheerful after a slew of Shostakovich, but a distinct joie de vivre seemed to spark behind the sound. This is what you get when you treat 200+-year-old music as a living tradition: Haydn's humor shone through the ample false endings of his symphony's final movement, some of which even got a few claps from the audience before they realized the orchestra was still playing. Centuries later, he's still full of surprises. Advertisement Paul Lewis, one of the greatest living players of Beethoven, once told me that if he were to make breakfast for the composer, he'd make 'a mess of eggs.' There are as many ways to approach Beethoven's music as there are to prepare said eggs, and even though it was only a few weeks ago that 06bso - Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. (Joseph Sedarski) Joseph Sedarski The tuning of intervals on the fortepiano is somewhat different than that of a modern piano, and the piece resounded with little strains of blithe dissonance that nonetheless never detracted from the whole, but gave it an air of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of beauty in the impermanent and imperfect. In the second movement, which sets up piano and orchestra as adversaries, Cohen led the orchestra through forceful and brisk retorts to Bezuidenhout's delicate tunes; the finale was all mischief and fun. In a side room, there was a Advertisement As an encore, Bezuidenhout graced the audience with another thoughtful turn around the Regier's keyboard: the songful slow movement from Beethoven's Sonata No. 4. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA / HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY At Symphony Hall. A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
