Sir Roger Norrington Essentials

As the privately educated son of a vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Sir Roger Norrington (1934-2025) was perhaps an unlikely maverick. Yet, the conductor challenged and often demolished received wisdom about the performance of early music, igniting controversy by arguing that the pervasive use of string vibrato only took hold in the 1920s. He described his campaign against vibrato as his “last hand grenade”, one lobbed at an orchestral establishment wedded to a soundworld invented during the decade of “glamorous” Art Deco hotel lobbies and ocean liners. Norrington brought his determination to recover the more subtle orchestral sounds of the past to guest dates with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and his pioneering term as principal conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. Norrington’s musicmaking was collegial, receptive to ideas suggested by fellow performers, and always guided by his understanding of the composer’s intentions. Whether directing modern symphony orchestras or period-instrument ensembles, his own London Classical Players among them, he used his deep knowledge of how things were (or might have been) done in the past to build interpretations that thrilled many and infuriated others. He countered sombre, reverential performances of Beethoven’s nine symphonies with fleet-footed visions of each, in which the composer’s famously fast metronome markings were followed to the letter. And he unlocked Mozart’s playful side in The Magic Flute, while finding strikingly fresh things to say in the music of, among others, Brahms, Bruckner, Elgar, Mahler and Wagner.