Remembering Roger

I first met Sir Roger Norrington when I attended the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London. He conducted the Academy's Baroque orchestra and chamber choir in Haydn's Symphony No. 44, Trauer, and Mozart's Requiem. Conducting students were encouraged to attend the rehearsals. I remember when he asked the choir to sing with "pure tone," a term he used that meant no vibrato at all. He referenced 18th-century treatises that defined vibrato as an embellishment to be employed only occasionally. It was in the 1930s, not before, that vibrato became a more consistent element of instrumental and vocal sound, he explained to us. It was also in these rehearsals that I first heard him insist that long notes and repeated notes should always either crescendo or decrescendo. Over the years I heard him reiterate this with different ensembles. A signature of Roger’s performances was always a clear direction and vitality in phrasing. He advised the students on Baroque bowing while also demonstrating for the singers his vision for phrasing and for the dramatic enunciation of the text. Rather than taking a proper break in between rehearsals, he held court in the cafeteria, sharing stories that made us laugh. We delved into the rehearsal process, his research on Haydn and Mozart, and 18th-century performance practice. 

After the final concert, I went backstage to thank him for letting us observe his way of working. He summed up the week saying, "So, that's how you do it." About a year later, I sent him some recordings of the period-instrument orchestra I had begun to direct in St. Petersburg. As busy as he was, he always listened to my offerings and took the time to respond (in his classic, concise way). In response to the first one I sent from St. Petersburg, he wrote "the style is convincing and enjoyable to listen to." This meant the world to me.

A few years later, Roger invited me to "come see what we're doing in Stuttgart with the Radio Symphony. We're playing Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler with pure tone. You should hear this." I made it to Stuttgart just in time for his last concert as principal conductor [1998-2011], a performance of Mahler's 9th Symphony. I said hello to him in his dressing room before the first rehearsal. He was reading the front section of The Times in a most relaxed fashion. I wondered to myself why he didn’t appear at all nervous about his first rehearsal of Mahler's 9th? I sat behind the orchestra and honed in on his every word. He didn't have to ask the orchestra to play with pure tone; by this time, they knew what he wanted. The playing in these rehearsals gave a transparency to Mahler's counterpoint that was revelatory to me. In the final hushed chords of the concert, I could swear that the concertmaster was crying. It was their conductor’s last concert with them and they loved him. The experience made me fully appreciate Mahler for the first time.

The following year, Roger became principal conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. When I went to visit him in Zurich, he joked over a glass of wine that this was his "retirement job." Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Between his busy concert schedule in Zurich and his full guest conducting calendar, he was still keeping a schedule of at least 40 weeks a year. I attended his recording sessions of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 with pianist Sebastian Knauer. Often, hearing Roger perform a piece would inspire me to program it myself, and a couple of years later I found myself leading this concerto with The Clarion Orchestra and pianist Nimrod David Pfeffer.

In the summer of 2018, I visited him in Salzburg to watch him prepare a program of Mozart and Haydn symphonies with the Salzburg Camerata. Outside of rehearsals, he asked me for my thoughts on what I was hearing. Occasionally, an idea I mentioned would make its way into rehearsal. I am unsure whether he actually liked my ideas, or if he introduced them just to be nice. The latter would not surprise me; he was very generous in this way. Over dinner together after one of the rehearsals, he let his guard down in a way that I had not seen before. He said, smiling: "I'm really not that well-trained. You are probably much better-trained than I am. It just so happens that there are certain pieces I conduct better than anyone else." The first part of this statement was overly humble, but the second, coming from him, rang true. It did seem that there were certain pieces that spoke to him in a clearer way than to anyone else. He understood that he had a particular gift, and he spent his many years sharing it with all of us. 

Later that summer, my wife, Kristyna, and I had the chance to visit Roger at his home in Devon. When we arrived he was studying his score of Brahms's First Symphony in his idyllic garden, preparing for a performance the following week in Germany. He berated me for staying only one day: "Devon is a place you come for a week, not a day!" But we had a memorable afternoon tea with him in the English style. He had just renovated and fully moved into Glebe House, a late 18th-century home near the south coast of England. When the pandemic struck, Glebe House became his hideaway. It was hard to pity him when, in the spring of 2020, I reached out to see how he was faring, and he sent me a picture (attached) reminding me of the splendor of Glebe House: "We are quite happy isolating on our Devon hilltop until a vaccine might appear. Here is our prison ...1775; Mozart time. …" 

Roger had an easy and elegant style about him, and not only musically. Always well put together, he liked to ride in good cars and reminisce about the "golden days of air travel" that, he said, I had missed out on by being too young. He seemed to adore his wife Kay and enjoyed spending time with her and their kids "already in their 50s" in Devon on weekends. He was clearly a happily married man. "Only one divorce!" he joked with me—not too bad for a star conductor. 

His elegant style was even evident in rehearsals. In all those hours watching him, I only once saw him get flustered (with a piano soloist who had a different tempo in mind). Even then, his grace presided. It belied all the hard work he put in behind the scenes. No one was ever better prepared for rehearsal. He even studied his own recordings from earlier in his career. He was 99 percent proud of his earlier recordings, though occasionally he was critical: "too much vibrato," he would say of the Schütz Choir's performance in his famed 1987 recording of Beethoven 9th Symphony. But he otherwise referenced his legendary discography with tremendous pride. After his retirement in 2021, he wrote me that it was "nice to be finally peaceful after all that rushing about. Listening to a lot of wonderful old recordings." (I am quite sure he meant his own.)  

Many, including myself, thought of Roger as a scholar. But he would correct people: He was a conductor, first and foremost. He enjoyed thwarting tradition but always with scholarship at his back. His tempos, for example, were based on what, to the best of our knowledge, the Italian terms "Andante," "Adagietto," etc., meant to the 18th-century musician. In performing Mozart, he insisted that cut time meant two beats per measure, not four. Therefore, his introduction to the opera Don Giovanni is literally twice as fast as other conductors take it. While I am still getting used to that, I have to say that he absolutely nails the tempo of the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Adagio Cantabile, in his Stuttgart recording. Just that slight bit more relaxed than his earlier recording with London Classical Players. this one is beautifully shaped—more of a flowing, reflective cantabile.

I thought Roger continued to get better with age, and that much of his best work was in the second half of his career working with modern orchestras. The sheer virtuosity and technical flawlessness of his earlier recordings with the London Classical Players gave way to an increased sensitivity and warmth that I have come to treasure in his later work. His recordings of Wagner and Tchaikovsky from Stuttgart are still under-appreciated. Most of all, his performance of the orchestral music from Parsifal seems to lift a veil off this music. It sounds more Romantic to me than the slower, heavier, vibrato-laden performances one generally hears. There is something so direct, even hauntingly stark, about his rendition. I believe Roger's conviction was right that: "the further we venture into the future, the harder we must work to recapture the sound world of the 18th and 19th centuries." We had veered away from Wagner's sound world in the 20th century, but he re-envisioned it, and, in a way, he rediscovered it. (Listen to the haunting "pure tone" and use of portamento in the Prelude to Act III of Parsifal, and the hymn-like qualities of the finale of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony.)

At a certain point, I had been spending so much time watching Roger that I noticed some Roger-isms beginning to appear in my own conducting. I found myself trying out a couple of his charming phrases, but they fell flat. It was rather demoralizing! But over time, I realized that what made Roger a great communicator, both on and off the podium, was his authenticity. He was always completely himself. This was perhaps the most valuable, and difficult, lesson that I learned from him. When this became clear, something changed in me. I felt that I became a better communicator and a better conductor.

Roger Norrington died on July 18, 2025. He was 91.

Steven Fox is the artistic director of The Clarion Choir & The Clarion Orchestra in New York and music director of Cathedral Choral Society at Washington National Cathedral. An active guest conductor, he is known to specialize in Baroque and Classical repertoire, as well as Rachmaninoff and his contemporaries.

Photos from the top: Sir Roger Norrington; with Steven Fox in Zurich; Glebe House; Steven Fox