Sir Roger Norrington
Sir Roger Norrington / Photo: Manfred Esser
For nearly fifty years Roger Norrington has been at the forefront of the movement for historically informed orchestral playing. Whether with his own London Classical Players in the 1980’s or with his Stuttgart Radio Symphony or Camerata Salzburg in recent years, he has sought to put modern players in touch with the historical style of the music they play. The work involves orchestra size and seating, tempo, phrasing, articulation and sound.
Sir Roger (he was knighted by the Queen in 1997) sang and played the violin from a young age, and began to conduct at Cambridge. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Sir Adrian Boult and at the same time founded the first of several groups for the performance of early music, the Heinrich Schütz Choir. This was followed ten years later by the London Classical Players who achieved worldwide fame with their dramatic recordings of the 9 Beethoven Symphonies. Works by Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, and many others followed, and established Norrington as a key exponent of historical style.
As early as 1966 Norrington had been made Music Director of the new and exciting Kent Opera. Here again he brought into play innovative thinking about orchestra size, playing style and tempi, particularly with the earlier repertoire. He conducted many hundreds of performances for Kent and went on to work at Covent Garden and the English National Opera for La Scala and La Fenice and at the Vienna Staatsoper.
The choir, the orchestra and the opera had done their pioneering work and Norrington moved on to share his historical findings with more "modern" orchestras, choirs and opera companies. He is a regular guest with many of the world’s major orchestras – the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw Orkest, the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia. In the US he regularly visits, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Philadelphia and Handel and Haydn Orchestras, Minesota Symphony and St Lukes Orchestra in New York.
More permanent posts with orchestras have included Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Music Director of the Orchestra of St Lukes in New York, Chief Conductor (now Emeritus) of the Salzburg Camerata and (since 1998) Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (a title he will hold through 2011). With Stuttgart Sir Roger has made a remarkable series of recordings span examples of the whole core orchestral repertoire, with sets of symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. Taken together they offer a vivid glimpse of how a modern symphony can get in touch with its historical roots.