Roger and out

As a leading pioneer of the period performance movement, Roger Norrington has transformed how we hear composers from Bach to Mahler. As he retires, he shares his memories with Julian Haylock

- Julian Haylock

On 18 November last year at Sage Gateshead, Roger Norrington left the concert stage for the final time. A programme devoted to his favourite composer, 'Joe's the guy' Haydn, brought the curtain down on an illustrious career that had totally changed the way we listen to music. Thanks largely to Norrington's benign radicalism, we now take almost for granted historically accurate orchestral layouts, authentic instruments and playing techniques, flowing tempos, aerated textures and senza vibrato (without vibrato, 'that wobbly stuff').

Looking back 60 years to when it all began with the Schütz Choir and London Baroque Players, I wonder whether Norrington had always seen himself as a musical crusader. 'In fact, I really didn't have any idea where it was going to go,' he smiles. 'I was 28 when I formed the Schütz Choir, and at that point I was thinking in terms of being a busy amateur musician conducting, singing and playing. There was absolutely no thought of my building a career out of it. My formative musical experiences included seeing Furtwängler and Beecham conduct just after the War, and singing under Klemperer. I happily accepted all those slow tempos - indeed, I thought they were really rather wonderful!'

Then he discovered Schütz quite by chance and began researching everything he could lay his hands on. Almost as a bit of a gas,' he recalls, 'in 1962 we put on an all-Schütz concert at St Bartholomew's London, and to my amazement and delight it was very well received by the critics. Over the next ten years we performed a vast quantity of early music, much of which had no central performing tradition associated with it - so we had to invent one!'