Innovator, erudite, entertaining and acclaimed conductor Sir Roger Norrington founded the Schütz Choir, became founding music director of Kent Opera and established the London Classical Players, the period-instrument orchestra.
His recordings of historically informed Beethoven's complete symphonies with the latter that opened his collaboration with EMI received unanimous critical acclaim. The success led to a busy and productive recording programme that covered music from Purcell and Handel to Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner, encompassing orchestral works, choral works and opera. A rich and varied collection of recordings released under EMI, Virgin and Warner Classics that illustrates the Guardian's observation: “arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century … a man who has emphatically changed classical music for the better.”
Sir Roger Norrington: The Complete Erato Recordings (45 CDs) brings together all the recordings that the British conductor Sir Roger Norrington (b. 1934) made for EMI Classics, Virgin and Warner Classics Classics over the years from 1986 and 2004.
These recordings marked out Norrington internationally as an important and pioneering presence in the field of historically informed performance, particularly in the music of Beethoven and composers of the Romantic era. He achieved prominence at a time when ‘authentic’ performance had been focused primarily on music of the Classical, Baroque and Renaissance eras, i.e. pre-Beethoven.
Norrington’s impact was summed up in 1989 by the New York Times: “The English conductor Roger Norrington … has become about the hottest commodity in classical music ... the most talked-about star of the early-music movement, which is devoted to the historical re-creation of the sounds and styles of performance akin to those the composer heard in his own lifetime. He has achieved this prominence partly through the widely recognized excellence of his interpretations, but also by his eager enthusiasm in pushing forward the chronological limits of the movement into familiar 19th-century Romantic repertory. Mr. Norrington isn't playing ‘early music’ any more … but mainstream classical standards in a fresh and enlivening manner … No-one has been more admired in this repertory than Mr. Norrington, who has combined brisk tempos, dramatic accents, interpretive niceties and a lively responsiveness to period timbres into one vibrant package.”
When, at the age of 87 in 2021, Norrington gave his last-ever concert, the Guardian described him as “arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century … a man who has emphatically changed classical music for the better.”
Sir Roger Norrington was born in 1934 in Oxford, where his father was an academic.
He learned the violin and also sang as a boy chorister. While a student at Cambridge University he sang as a tenor and also started conducting. He went on to study conducting at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Sir Adrian Boult.
In 1962 he founded the Schütz Choir and in 1969 became founding music director of Kent Opera, an enterprising touring company with which the stage director Jonathan Miller was also closely associated. Its repertoire ranged from the Baroque to contemporary composers such as Tippett. Norrington remained with Kent Opera until 1984.
In 1978 Norrington established the London Classical Players, the period-instrument orchestra with which he made the vast majority of the recordings in this collection.
In London in 1987 Norrington and the London Classical Players achieved a major impact with The Beethoven Experience, a lively three-day programme of concerts, lectures and exhibitions that culminated in performances of Beethoven’s Symphonies nos 8 and 9. Norrington’s aim was “to recapture something of the exhilaration and disturbance Beethoven’s music generated in his day.”
While there was always scholarship behind Norrington’s performances, and he aroused much discussion with his observation of the composer’s metronome markings, he said: “I totally agree with those who have questioned the meaning of the word 'authenticity’ … Of course, what we do is not 'authentic'; I never use the word, myself. Passion is everything.”
When EMI released Norrington’s first recording of Beethoven symphonies (nos 2 and 8) in 1987, Gramophone wrote: “With this exceptionally exciting new record, Roger Norrington joins … a small elite of musicians working with period instruments whose interpretations of Haydn, Mozart and Beethöoven can stand comparison with the best we have had on record on modern instruments during the past 20 or 30 years … Norrington's way with Beethoven … is recognizably Toscaninian in some of its aspects … What really fascinates Norrington is rhythm and pulse and their determining agencies: eighteenth-century performing styles, instrumental articulacy (most notably, bowing methods), and Beethoven's own metronome markings … This is the most interesting and enjoyable new record of a Beethoven symphony I have heard for some considerable time.”
The success of Norrington’s recordings with the London Classical Players of the Beethoven symphonies led to a busy and productive recording programme that covered music from Purcell and Handel to Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner, encompassing orchestral works, choral works and opera.
Norrington’s revelatory interpretation of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (released in 1989) attracted particular attention. Gramophone described it as “a performance of imaginative sweep and excitement, and a record by which future performance of the work will have to be measured.”
Complementing the recordings with the London Classical Players are recordings made with: the Orchestra of St Luke's (a live recording of a star-studded Rossini Bicentenary Concert in New York, 1992), Camerata Salzburg (Mozart concertos with Daniel Hope and Sebastian Knauer), and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (a recital of Handel opera arias by countertenor David Daniels). In the course of his conducting career, Norrington held posts with all three of these orchestras and with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre de chambre de Paris and Bournemouth Sinfonietta.
Buoyed by his success with the London Classical Players, Norrington was invited to conduct such orchestras as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Phihamoniker, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Philadelphia Orchestra and Philharmonia. Over his career he made appearances with opera companies including the Royal Opera (Covent Garden), English National Opera, La Scala (Milan), La Fenice (Venice) and Wiener Staatsoper.
