When Roger Norrington steps on to the Royal Festival Hall stage for his 75th
birthday concert on Monday, the praise will be lavish. Sir Nicholas Kenyon,
the former controller of Radio 3 and director of Proms and now managing
director of the Barbican, will lead the official tributes, flanked by
assorted great and good. The two orchestras with which the conductor is most
associated, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Stuttgart
Radio Symphony Orchestra, will alternate in a programme that spans some 250
years. Baroque motets by Schütz will cosy up to the slow movement of
Mahler's Fifth Symphony. A slice of a Bach orchestral suite sits with a
dollop of Elgar's Enigma Variations. The unusual mix is, the conductor says
genially, “sort of old-fashioned”, a description that would satisfy were he
not to quickly amend it. It's also, he says, “a manifesto” and “a mission
statement”.
Norrington is used to being a man on a mission. For one thing, there is the
rather astonishing fact that he's been battling skin cancer and a brain
tumour for more than 15 years. Only the work of a controversial New York
specialist, he says, has enabled him to reach his 75th birthday (the great
man will be there on Monday to admire his patient in action). “The great
thing about the programme I'm on is that I'm attacking the cancer all the
time. Six times a day I take eight pills of enzymes, so I've got it
constantly on the back foot.”
Could we expect any less from one of classical music's great fighters? From
the 1960s onward, few did more than Norrington to spearhead the period music
movement, a campaign that forced radical re-evaluations of composers as
wideranging as Monteverdi and Mozart, Bach and Berlioz. Played on
instruments the composers themselves would have heard, once familiar pieces
sounded transformed.
And now? Despite Monday's hoopla, Norrington is a rare presence in our concert
halls. “I would love to have a connection with another London orchestra,” he
admits. “But I have two concerts a year in London, and I do regret that.”
But he doesn't regret the reason: Norrington's music-making remains
uncompromising, and not all orchestras want to embrace it.
For Norrington's rules remain rigid. He now applies the “period” style to all
the music he conducts, whether Mahler (died 1911) or Elgar (1934) and to
whichever orchestra he is leading, whether they play original instruments
(the OAE) or modern ones (the SRSO). It includes a near-total ban on
vibrato, a stylistic effect produced by bending the note, which many
experts, Norrington included, believe was rarely used before the 1930s. “It
is perfectly possible that having pushed the thing this far, that everybody
will say ‘f*** off Roger, we have tried it, we don't really like it and it's
almost cerainly wrong.' Well, that's perfectly possible, and then I won't
get another job, but it's a risk I have to take. And mostly bands do want to
try it.”
Fidelity to the score is the sine qua non for Norrington. It was one of the
reasons why his hugely influential Beethoven symphony cycle with the London
Classical Players was quite so stunning: original tempo markings were
observed, with the result that what was once stately sounded lean and wild.
“The point is not to be different - you can't help being different, because
everyone is doing something else - but the point is to try and be true, to
be honest.”
Perhaps it was an outsider's zeal that gave Norrington that impetus to
consider things afresh. The son of Sir Arthur Norrington, Oxford
vice-chancellor and originator of the Norrington league table, the young
Norrington had always been musical, playing the violin and singing first as
a treble and then as a tenor in amateur choirs. But he never studied music
formally, and when he took his first leap into choral conducting he was
working at Oxford University Press. What changed things was a step into the
unknown: finding the then-unknown music of Schütz, and establishing a
professional choir devoted to his music. “There was no way of singing
Schütz,” he recalls, “so we had to invent a specific style”.
What happened next, as the Schütz Choir made way for the London Classical
Players and Beethoven, Beethoven made way for Berlioz and Berlioz for Brahms
was, in a sense, simply more of the same: historical scholarship paving the
way for often revelatory live performances. “With the Schütz Choir it was
how do you sing 17th-century music - no one was doing it. Then it was how do
you reinvent opera in a small house, with original instruments - that was
Kent Opera. And then with the London Classical Players it was how do you
play everything, from Haydn to eventually Bruckner, on original instruments.
And then just when you think you've done all that you go to Stuttgart, so
the project there is can a standard symphony orchestra play like the OAE, or
even better?” Monday's concert is a chance to find out.
Not everyone has hailed the SRSO and Norrington's partnership with such
enthuasiasm. Last summer their Proms performance caused a small storm when
Norrington continued his vibrato-less policy with Elgar, leading to a flurry
of horrified newspaper columns. But, even though he admits the issue now
dominates his reputation, he remains unbending. “I would just love to feel
that orchestras could ask ‘would you like it with or without, Sir?' Not
playing with vibrato was a pretty normal thing to do, because it was the
normal thing to do.”
Even if “the vibrato wars” may have damaged his stock, these battles clearly
keep him fresh, though Norrington says he's reaching the limits of new
composers to reinvent. “I've done what I'm going to do,” he says. “There'll
be other things, but I've basically set out my stall.” What he'll keep is
the pride of a real pioneer. “I don't really envy the next generation.
Because I'm sure they'll discover other things, and they may do it better
than we did. But only Lewis and Clark crossed the American continent for the
first time. That experience of gazing on an unknown landscape is so
incredibly exciting. And they'll never have that.”
Festival Hall, London SE1 (0871 6632500), Monday at 7.30pm
