Roger Norrington obit

Sir Roger Norrington, conductor who championed period instruments and called vibrato a ‘modern drug’

 He was not on the list.

Sir Roger Norrington, who has died aged 91, was a leading figure in the period-instrument movement and a vigorous and often controversial champion of musical authenticity.

Norrington’s search for authenticity moved well beyond using period instruments and into the more contentious areas of tempi and technique, in which he waged campaigns in favour of composers’ metronome markings, and against the “modern drug” of vibrato which, he claimed, orchestras did not generally use until the 1930s.

But while most critics accepted his treatment of the Baroque and Classical repertoire where his pioneering work with the Schütz Choir and the London Classical Players revealed the original beauty and transparency of harmony, some balked at the idea of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner or Mahler being given the Norrington treatment.

His interpretations of Beethoven in particular, sticking as they did to the composer’s own metronome markings, were dismissed by some as “implausibly fast”. Yet others found his performances a revelation, and his pioneering set of the Beethoven symphonies with the period instruments of the London Classical Players, recorded for EMI in the 1980s, won prizes around the world and lobbed a grenade at a symphony-orchestra establishment still wedded to the lush “monumental” interpretations associated with Klemperer and von Karajan.

Roger Arthur Carver Norrington was born in Oxford on March 16 1934 into a university family. His father, Sir Arthur Norrington, was vice-chancellor of Oxford and the originator of the Norrington league table, which ranks Oxford colleges. Both parents were musical, having met while singing Gilbert and Sullivan in an amateur production. His mother was a good pianist, and the young Roger learnt the violin and sang as a boy soprano.

After being evacuated to Canada during the war, he returned home to Oxford aged 10, and was sent to the Dragon School, where he auditioned for the chorus in Iolanthe and was given the lead. He went on to Westminster School, and then, after National Service as an RAF fighter controller in Bournemouth, read English at Clare College, Cambridge.

After graduation he took a job at Oxford University Press, where he published religious books. In his spare time he sang as a tenor in a couple of choirs, played in an orchestra and in quartets and did the odd bit of conducting.

In the early 1960s he “stumbled upon” the work of Heinrich Schütz, then a relatively unknown 17th-century German composer, whose work had just been published in Germany. Determined to perform as much of it as possible, in 1962 Norrington formed the Schütz Choir and put on a performance in London.

In the audience was the principal of the Royal College of Music, Keith Falkner, who invited Norrington to study at the college. Resigning his post at OUP, he studied conducting under Sir Adrian Boult, played percussion in the RCM orchestra and continued his studies in the history of the orchestra.

In 1972, the Schütz Choir was wound up and Norrington then undertook the first period-instrument Messiah – in Handel’s church in Hanover Square, London – and Monteverdi’s Vespers. In 1978 he founded the London Classical Players with whom, over the next 20 years, he expanded his investigations of the repertoire, consulting the best scholars to ask about how the music would have been played in the composer’s day. From 1969 to 1984 he was music director of Kent Opera, conducting more than 400 performances of 40 different works.

Norrington’s Beethoven recordings were followed by other no less stimulating interpretations of other 18th- and 19th-century composers. He became the first to conduct authentic period-instrument performances of Haydn’s Creation, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Brahms’s Symphony No 1 and many other works. But he did not confine himself to period instruments and saw it as important to get an authentic sound out of modern instruments.

He worked as a guest conductor with orchestras around Europe and America, conducted at Covent Garden and the English National Opera and in Italy at La Scala, La Fenice and the Maggio Musicale.

A Norrington concert was an unusual experience, the performance often peppered with chummy asides and mini-lectures from the conductor. The highlight of his concert career was the “Experiences”, a series of intensive whole weekends at London’s South Bank devoted to studying and performing the work of particular composers.

Behind the friendly chat, some found there was a didactic quality to Norrington’s music-making which allowed little room for opposition. Yet righteous indignation of traditionalists merely seemed to fuel Norrington’s evangelical fire and he particularly enjoyed producing the historical evidence to trounce his critics.

In the 1990s he became closely associated with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which took over the work of the London Classical Players in 1997. But he spent increasing amounts of time abroad, becoming principal conductor of the Camerata Salzburg in 1997 and, the following year, chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, which he took to London in 2016 to give the orchestra’s final performance, at the Proms, before its merger with SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg.

If Norrington’s interpretations of Beethoven sent shockwaves through the musical establishment, the response to his interpretations of Wagner and Mahler was even more polarised: his non-vibrato recording of Mahler’s second symphony with the Stuttgart orchestra provoked gasps of horror from traditionalists.

In other Proms appearances he conducted the First Night in 2006 and the Last Night in 2008. He was principal conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra from 2011.

In the early 1990s Norrington was diagnosed with skin cancer, and in 1995 he underwent successful surgery to remove a brain tumour.

Roger Norrington was appointed OBE in 1980, advanced to CBE in 1990, and was knighted in 1997.

He was twice married, first, in 1964 (dissolved 1982), to Susan McLean May, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and secondly, in 1986, to the dancer and choreographer Kay Lawrence, with whom he formed the Early Opera Project to complement his concert work in period-style opera, and with whom he had a son.