‘Music’s full of laughter and love. It’s not a sacred object’
Tonight, Roger Norrington, 87, hangs up his baton. He tells Ivan Hewett about a life spent challenging musical norms
‘It took me a long time to dare to ask an orchestra to play without vibrato’
Sir Roger Norrington, one of the founding fathers of the so-called “historically informed performance” movement, who’s changed the way we hear classical music from Monteverdi to Schumann and Berlioz, has decided it’s time to hang up his baton. The all-haydn concert he is conducting tonight with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, in Gateshead, will be his last, after a career of almost 60 years.
“Well, I am 87 now,” he says, talking from a hotel in Newcastle. “I don’t have the energy I used to have, and, frankly, during the pandemic I’ve got a bit rusty. I just have to hope nobody notices the rust falling off on Thursday. I’m looking forward to leading a different life. I’m doing a lot of thinking and reading and walking on the Dartmoor Hills, where I live.”
This will be sad news for classical music lovers, for whom Norrington is part of their lives. It feels as if this amusing gadfly of music has always been there, pushing against the consensus view of how composers’ music should sound. Even as a “grand old man” he’s kept his puckish humour and enjoys taking a rise out of concert formalities. Many people still rage against the idea of applause between movements of a piece; when Norrington conducts he spins round in his chair and encourages everyone to applaud, with a naughty grin.
But underneath the gadfly is a deeply serious musician. His two recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies, the first with his own
London Classical Players in the late 1980s, are startling in their energy and passion, not to mention their incredibly fast tempos. During his 15 years as musical director of Kent Opera, he led performances of operas from Monteverdi to Michael Tippett’s King Priam which people still remember for their musical cogency and dramatic power. “And don’t forget I have conducted 60 world premieres in my time,” he adds. “I’m not just an ‘earlymusic’ musician.”
Norrington’s first foray into music was as a tenor in the 1960s and, in 1962, he founded an amateur choir dedicated to the music of the little-known German Baroque composer Heinrich Schütz.
“In those days, newspapers would review an amateur choir if it was serious,” he says. “We got some very good reviews and started to get noticed.” This led to his appointment at Kent Opera. In 1978, he founded the London Classical Players to explore more historically authentic ways of performing old classical music, and then, in 1986, he set up the Early Opera Group with his second wife, the choreographer Kay Lawrence, to restore the original pristine colours of Baroque operas.
Who were his mentors in the early days? “Well, they weren’t any really,” he says after a pause. “Apart from the Viennese conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Vienna. It was hearing his recording of Haydn’s Creation on old instruments that really opened my eyes and made me realise there was a better way of performing this music. So I started to do lots of reading, I
devoured all the old treatises by 17th and 18th-century musicians, I talked to lots of scholars in universities. It amazed me that there was all this expertise about how old music should sound slumbering in our universities, but performers just couldn’t be bothered to seek it out.”
Wasn’t there a danger that all this book learning could lead to dry-as-dust performances? “Not at all,” he replies. “I prefer to think of it as trying to ride two horses at once, like they do in the circuses. The white horse is one’s passion and fantasy as a musician, which is absolutely essential. The black horse is something equally essential, which is the facts. There’s nothing so stimulating to the imagination as an interesting fact
about how music used to be.” As an example, he cites the word “Andante”.
“Even now, many performers and conductors assume this means ‘slow’,” he says. “But the word actually means ‘going’, and, once you realise that, your whole conception of a Mozart Andante changes. Instead of being this heavy wallowing” – he makes a grotesque tube-train noise that parodies many a famous conductor’s Andante – “you have something graceful and simply more musical.”
Some of Norrington’s other ideas have raised eyebrows, even among his colleagues in the “early music” world. His tempos in Beethoven’s symphonies are so fast partly because he trusts the speed indications given by a
mechanical device called the metronome, which many say was unreliable in Beethoven’s time.
“I just don’t buy that,” he says. “The metronome is very simple mechanically, it’s a kind of clock, and clocks were around for centuries before Beethoven. In any case,” he adds, “playing the first movement of the Eroica at a speed of one bar per second is so thrilling! I mean this is a battle scene, isn’t it? If you play the music at that speed it really sounds like horses galloping, which I’m sure is what Beethoven intended.”
Even more controversial is Norrington’s insistence that orchestral string players play without vibrato, that manner of playing a note with a tremor that adds expressive warmth. “It took me a long time to dare to ask an orchestra to play without vibrato, I think it was 2000,” says Norrington. “But whenever I do, players and audiences are astonished at how beautiful it sounds. You can actually hear each note clearly, and shape it expressively, without this foggy vibrato getting in the way.”
Norrington has even used this method with that arch-romantic composer Anton Bruckner, who he says is constantly misunderstood. “We think of Bruckner as always on his knees in church, but in fact he was very worldly. He liked the ladies, and he liked to have a drink. In one of his symphonies, he combines a church chorale and a polka, but most conductors find that an outrageous idea, and take the music so slow you can’t hear it as a polka.”
I wonder whether Norrington’s confidence to challenge accepted views comes from the fact that he rose to prominence slowly.
“Yes, I think that was a great help,” he agrees. “Also, it was a help that I was a singer, and so knew music from the inside. I was happy to take things slowly – 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. It’s not about consecrating a sacred object, it’s about exploring and being curious and having fun.”