Acclaimed conductor Roger Norrington dead at age 91

Roger Norrington, a conductor acclaimed for historically informed performances during more than a half-century leading orchestras in Europe and the United States, has died. He was 91.

Norrington died Friday at his home, his son Tom said Saturday. Norrington lived outside Exeter, England.

Norrington conducted both period-instruments and modern orchestras, asking both types to play without vibrato and usually at faster tempi than modern practice.

“He was an extraordinary dramatist. He made things happen emotionally,” Myron Lutzke, an Orchestra of St. Luke’s cellist who helped persuade Norrington to become music director, said Saturday. “He had his detractors, certainly, and some of them were some of my best friends. But for me, he got the music off the page. He made the concert experience transformative.”

Born on March 16, 1934, Norrington was the son of Arthur, president of Trinity College, Oxford, and the former Edith Carver. A violinist and boy soprano in his youth, Roger attended The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Dragon School, Westminster School, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music, where he studied under conductor Adrian Boult.

In 1962, Norrington founded the Schütz Choir, originally dedicated to the works of Heinrich Schütz. He became music director of Kent Opera from 1969-84, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta from 1985-89 and New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s from 1990-94.

He was principal conductor of Camerata Salzburg from 1997 to 2006, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2011 and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra from 2011-16.

“Orchestras didn’t generally use vibrato until the 1930s,” Norrington told The Guardian in 2007. “It is a fashion, like smoking, which came in at about the same time. Smoking is now going, so maybe vibrato will too. … I have discovered, all the way from Monteverdi to Mahler, is that when music is played as it should be, the sound is wonderful, the expression is wonderful and the instruments match together.”

Norrington was nominated for four Grammy Awards and won in 2001 for a recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell and the London Philharmonic. Norrington retired after conducting the Royal Northern Sinfonia in an all-Hadyn concert on Nov. 18, 2021.

“I have enjoyed every minute of over 50 years of making music with some of the most wonderful and talented musicians in the world,” he said in a statement. “The time has come to step off the podium.”

His first marriage, to Susan McLean May, ended in a divorce in 1982. He married the choreographer Kay Lawrence in the mid-1980s; she died last year.

Norrington was made a Knight Bachelor in 1997.

He is survived by Tom and two children from his first marriage, Ben and Amy.