Roger Norrington |

Roger Norington

Surprisingly, in a series of high-profile names of authentic conductors – from Nikolaus Harnoncourt or John Eliot Gardiner to William Christie or Rene Jacobs – the name of Roger Norrington, a truly legendary outstanding musician, who has been “at the forefront” of historical (authentic) performance for almost half a century, just in Russia it is far from being known to the extent that it deserves it.

Roger Norrington was born in 1934 in Oxford into a musical university family. As a child, he had a wonderful voice (soprano), from the age of ten he studied violin, from seventeen – vocals. He received his higher education at Cambridge, where he studied English literature. Then he took up music professionally, graduating from the Royal College of Music in London. He was knighted and given the title “Sir” by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain in 1997.

The sphere of extensive creative interests of the conductor is the music of three centuries, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In particular, unusual for a conservative music fan, but at the same time, Norrington’s convincing interpretations of Beethoven’s symphonies using authentic instruments earned him worldwide fame. Their recordings, made for EMI, have won prizes in the UK, Germany, Belgium and the US and are still considered the benchmark for contemporary performance of these works in terms of their historical authenticity. This was followed by recordings of works by Haydn, Mozart, as well as masters of the XIX century: Berlioz, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, Smetana. They made a significant contribution to the development of the interpretation of the style of musical romanticism.

During his impressive career, Roger Norrington has conducted extensively in the leading musical capitals of Western Europe and America, including at home. From 1997 to 2007 he was Principal Conductor of the Camerata Salzburg Orchestra. The maestro is also known as an opera interpreter. For fifteen years he was musical director of the Kent Opera. His reconstruction of Monteverdi’s opera The Coronation of Poppea became a world-class event. He has worked as a guest conductor at the Covent Garden, English National Opera, Teatro alla Scala, La Fenice, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Wiener Staatsoper. The maestro is a repeated participant of the Salzburg and Edinburgh Music Festivals. In the year of Mozart’s 250th birthday (2006), he conducted the opera Idomeneo in Salzburg.