An Interview with Sir Roger Norrington

By Paul Wegman Taylor

Paul Wegman Taylor recently sat down with Sir Roger Norrington for an in-depth and far-ranging discussion of Norrington’s life in music. This is the first in a four-part series.

Sir Roger Norrington, currently Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR), has been a leading figure of historically informed performance practice for 40 years. He first gained international attention in the 1980s through visceral period instrument performances and recordings of the Beethoven Symphony cycle with the London Classical Players. In the 1990’s, Norrington continued his historically informed exploration with music of Romantic composers such as Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, garnering further praise and controversy.

Long convinced by the historical evidence and by the results non-vibrato playing brings to most orchestra music, Norrington has, since 2000, continued asking “Why not play pure tone also with modern orchestras?” Adapting this non-vibrato approach not only for earlier music, but also for works by Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, and Elgar, Norrington encounters increasing enthusiasm from players and audiences alike.

Essentially, Sir Roger feels the entire repertoire until circa 1920 can be considered “early music, played to sound as fresh as the day it was written” with modern instruments. Instrumental playing with pure tone, and other well observed stylistic elements bring Vivaldi and Bach, as well as Haydn and Mozart, back to major symphony orchestra programming again. This is one of the more practical benefits of Norrington’s historically informed approach.

Sir Roger Norrington is the designated music director of the Zürich Chamber Orchestra, beginning in the 2011-2012 season.

“What I am interested in are questions…” – Sir Roger Norrington

Part 1 - Beginnings

PWT: In view of publication by the Conductors Guild, I would like to use its motto “Advancing the Art and Profession” as a general springboard to questions. Simultaneously I wish to touch on points of the past, present and future of both your career and your performance research.

Sir Roger, which circumstances brought you to conducting?

RN: I started as an amateur. Well, to explain a bit, I sang from the age of zero. I had a very good treble voice, and then a good broken voice. I was a performer in the London scene. Very high quality experiences. I was also a violinist: A very good, experienced amateur violinist, one could say a bottom range professional violinist.

From early on in music I gradually got interested in how things sound. I was inspired by Colin Davis, whom I knew quite well, Giulini, and Bernstein. I saw Furtwängler in 1946 when he came over with [the Berlin Philharmonic]. I suppose I wanted to shape the music. If I was playing in a string quartet, even on second violin, I was always telling the other players how to do it. Or, when singing in a choir I often felt, “well, I could do that better” or “why don’t you do it like that?”

I was inquiring, I wanted to know how to perform things. And I was a doer, so, while I was at Cambridge in England, reading English, there were some conductors around but they didn’t seem too good, and so I set up a concert and just did it: Bach and Handel at my College Chapel. And it was interesting because people enjoyed it. Immediately participants came and said “I’ll sing for you anywhere.” I was a complete amateur of course, only 19 or 20, but then I was given more opportunities at Cambridge to conduct.

Then I was a businessman in publishing in London playing the violin and singing amateur every evening. While I had ideas about music, watching a lot of indifferent conductors makes one think “I could do that better.” Watching a lot of good ones makes you think, “Wow, that would be amazing to have that kind of power,” but  “how on earth do they do it?” So, I was smitten by the idea of trying my hand. Soon I was looking for opportunities to lead a choir as well. Of course, watching very good conductors on one side, watching someone not so good, and seeing ‘you don’t want to do it like that, rather, like this’ on the other, may be more valuable. I gravitated to conducting.

PWT: You started rather early as a conductor, compared with other instrumentalists or soloists?

RN: You mean soloists such as Menuhin who started conducting later in their career. Well, perhaps yes at Cambridge I went on playing, singing, and conducting, and then in real life for the next five years as an amateur next to my work in publishing. Incidently, one of my sons is an amateur today in London playing viola, and one of my nephews, is an amateur conductor. Both are very good, and both are having a great time. I thought that’s what I would do, too. I felt making music was for fun. I had started a really good choir when I was 27, the Schütz Choir in London, with professional instrumentalists playing concerts, and there was something happening, and it was taken up by the press as showing potential. Within a year I had quit my job and set out to live from music at the age of 28: Again, mostly as a tenor.

I worked in all kinds of musical contexts and styles. In choirs, for example with Imogen Holst (Gustav Holst’s daughter) and with Benjamin Britten and the Bach Choir including the premiere of [Britten’s] War Requiem, for example. I sang solo jobs, various Messiahs, many radio jobs, new music, television opera: five productions. A Cosi fan tutte with Menuhin. It was a living, and on the side I continued conducting.

When I think of it, it was a bit like Haydn, and here my current program in Stuttgart is showing through. Haydn at age 17, circa 1749  was kicked out of the Cathedral School in Vienna when his voice broke, and so for the next ten years he freelanced, singing in choir, playing the violin in this chapel, playing keyboard and organ in that church on Sunday. We don’t know exact details at all.

[Haydn’s] Symphony No. 1, which we rehearsed this morning, was written by a full-blown musician of about 27 years old in 1759 for his first job as Kappellmeister with Count Morzin. His work fortunately got the attention of Prince Esterhazy who took Haydn into his service 1760-61, when Count Morzin had gone broke! This symphony occupies a completely different level than the first symphony by Mozart, written as a child in London. Anyway, I sense a slight echo of Haydn in my own biography, when I look back in my diaries and sometimes there were weeks without a paying job. I think it has always been that way: I’ve been freelance my whole life. This position has been my first permanent job! And it’s not full time! [Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony SWF since 1998]

PWT: So you don’t send your management looking for appropriate orchestras.

RN: I don’t have a management! Then as now, in the world of the freelance you just take anything you can get. A West End show, a school opera, an amateur choir concert in Newbury and a Judas Maccabeus in Edinburgh. You know, eight hours on the train and back the next day. It is completely different from being under contract in an orchestra, tied up for the rest of your life. It’s very free and it makes you think much more, of course, than being in one outfit. It sets you up to think, “Should we do it like this, like that?…is that really how Beethoven goes?”

What led me to conduct was wanting to make music tick, so to speak.

PWT: How important was Sir Adrian Boult to your training?

RN: Not terribly. I studied with Adrian [head of the conducting department at the Royal College of Music] for two years. His weekly instruction consisted of two hours in the morning in prelude to afternoon rehearsals with the top orchestra. He really was there to teach academics, organ scholars, mostly students who were not conducting majors. There wasn’t a top rate class at the RCM at that time.

[Boult] was a well-known trusted maestro with certain insights, but not the sort I wanted to be. Quite good at some things but not really exciting. Sort of meat and potatoes. I had rather my own idols like Giulini who was magnificent and very exciting. However I did learn certain things there at the RCM with Boult and it legitimized my activities. The rector, who had heard of me, had invited me to attend classes, to make the mileage per week, and learn what I wanted. It was wonderful, actually, and I was very respectful, and accordingly I now go back and teach there annually. However, I never was required to take exams then at age 28, 29. I have no music degrees, strictly speaking.

PWT: You don’t then practice or ascribe to a particular conducting school or technique?

RN: I learned by watching those that excited me, but let’s face it, conducting, the actual waving, isn’t very difficult, actually. What’s difficult is having ideas. Well, there are brilliant teachers, about two thousand of them in Finland as you know, at least the best ones seem to be in Finland and Russia, and they are incredibly interesting about the technique of conducting. But you don’t actually need a fantastic technique.

Conductors like Seiji Ozawa and Esa Pekka Salonen have wonderful, very impressive techniques, but it doesn’t necessarily get better music out of the orchestra. It looks nicer, but one doesn’t get more out of a Schumann symphony because of technique. Look at Furtwängler or Klemperer. They didn’t impress with their technique. They impressed with their ideas. What you have to do is be in time, have good patterns to be bearable to look at, be intelligent and have very particular, rather than just generic, ideas. This is what interests orchestras.

The musicians are not watching you for technique. Of course you’ve got to be clean, you’ve got to be clear, you have to be able to do Wolfgang Rihm and Stravinsky, but you don’t need to be a sort of acrobat. Colin Davis or Bernhard Haitink, are absolutely sufficient. Boult was the same. It has to be suitable to the music, but ideas you need! And ideas [are] what I was lucky enough to have. And that is what made it worth continuing.

PWT: The eternal amateur…

RN: In a way it comes back to that.  I’m still an amateur because I have no diplomas!

I had good music lessons early and some harmony, theory study at the RCM, forgotten most of it, but no degree qualifications! I am unqualified for this job, you see! Haven’t got grade one in anything! Not because I failed, but I took no exams. At university I studied English Literature. It delights me because it shows how important instinct is. Most of my work is instinct. Even the historical stuff. You get a clue from reading some theory, and then you immediately apply it to see if it works! It allows me to be spontaneous, this instinctive way. Inspiration comes from different sources.

I used to be very into the score, as one ought to be, very good at reading the score.

PWT: Did you work at the piano?

RN: No, no, not at all. I was never a pianist. Only a violinist and singer.

Actually I couldn’t stand the piano for myself. Lessons didn’t work. So I don’t sit down and play a score: I have to read it. Nowadays I do all the standard repertory that I do from memory, really quite a number of works.

I find I am returning to childhood in a way. One hears and remembers it at once when young. My young son reminds me of this constantly. That childlike remembering relationship to music completely aside from notes. Going back to some sense of that delight in music coming out of space hitting you, and you play the record til it’s worn out!

PWT: Did you go to concerts as a child?

RN: Rarely, very rarely! Nothing regular. I heard few concerts, but when I heard for instance Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, paaww! Made an impression. And we had only four records at home! And of course, I was playing myself all the time and singing. Haydn Quartets and so on up to Bartok’s latest at that time when I was in college. Do it yourself! An aural relationship with music is the thing. Remembering the tunes of an opera after hearing it once. Everyone can do it at an early age, if you’re somehow talented.

And now when I pick up a Brahms score again, a symphony say, I sometimes don’t recognize it! Don’t know what piece it is, while I’m doing them all from memory. And it frees me to listen to what the musicians are doing. It’s about knowing the music intimately. What’s more important, finally, the sound, or the score? However, when toiling over the first Bartok Quartet at Cambridge, I remember it being a point of honor to not listen to a recording, but to discover it entirely on our own. We had only the parts! No score. That was my early listening experience.

But today, paradoxically, instead of only the score I do use an iPod just to get familiar with things…or my own performances as a refresher! But also a bad performance for something less known is fine for basic information as to how it goes, and to develop the ideas how not to do it!

My second aural childhood. I can give the music better to the children in the audience! You hand it over to them. You don’t make a mystery of this score! This ernste Musik. 90% of music is fun! Not ernst at all. This goes for a lot of Mahler 5 actually, last movement for example, it’s a riot. Riot! To me it’s got to be fun, all about joy, love, joy. It’s an incredible gift. And so you mustn’t lose that.

As a professional you’re a facilitator for people. That’s very important for me. That’s where the amateur thing stays, you know. The best players are always amateur! I remember a wonderful violist in the ECO. Marvelous, larger than life, and he enjoyed every single concert he ever gave. Always exclaiming: “What a marvelous piece that is, Eine kleine Nachtmusik ach, fantastic!” “Messiah, amazing!” Absolutely genuine. Even under a lousy conductor, he could enjoy it. Eternal amateur, he’ll never grow up! <laughs>

Conductors who don’t smile, I don’t like!

Not many do, you know. Once in America after the first half of a concert a principal player came up to me saying “why were you making that funny face at me?” I said “I wasn’t, I was smiling because your solo was so beautiful.” He was very disgruntled, muttering “that never happened to me before!”

PWT: Much player morale is destroyed in the ego crush of the music business.

RN: That’s kind of, you know…<pause>…It’s only music.

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Paul Wegman Taylor is the founder and Music Director of the Swiss chamber ensemble orCHestra. He is also the conductor of the Kirchgemeindeorchester Zürich-Schwamendingen. An active symphonic and opera conductor, Paul has had engagements with the Vienna Opera Theater, Tonhalle Orchestra of Zürich and Jakobstads Orchestra in Finland.