Sir Roger Norrington

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety nine, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a musician. He's spent his career playing the music of the great composers the way he thinks they would want it played. The result has been not dry and authentic, but surprisingly modern. He didn't become a professional musician until he was twenty eight, but since then, with the Schutz Choir, Kent Opera, and the London Classical Players, he's brought the Baroque, Beethoven, and beyond to new, delighted audiences. Even such bastions of Conservatism as the Vienna Philharmonic have fallen for his charms. People put music on an altar and worship it, he says. It can be great for them, but hard luck on the music sometimes. He is Sir Roger Norrington. It's easy to think, Roger, that musicians like you who research music and want to use period instruments are very academic, very stuffy, frankly, but your ambition is to be completely the opposite, isn't it? To cut the waffle.

Sir Roger Norrington1:21

Absolutely, yes. It is a curious combination of things. You you you become historical to be new, and you go back in order to go forward.

Presenter1:28

But it's all very iconoclastic'cause you also, I think, don't mind if audiences applaud in the wrong places, like in the in in between movements and so on. You just can't

Sir Roger Norrington1:36

Upside down just

Sir Roger Norrington1:38

I want them to enjoy it. I want I mean most music is

Presenter1:39

I wanna

Sir Roger Norrington1:42

is fun or or enjoyable. I mean, there is some of it which is deeply serious and tragic, which is quite unsuitable for as it were fun, but most music was written to entertain people.

Sir Roger Norrington1:51

And until fairly recently it had to entertain people or the composer would simply die of starvation. There were no arts councils until very recently.

Presenter2:00

So it all begs the question really, who put the pomposity into it in the first place, that you're stripping out?

Sir Roger Norrington2:03

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington2:05

Yeah, I think it really happened in this century, as a matter of fact. I don't think it happened in the nineteenth century. People accuse the nineteenth century of of grandeur and bombast and so on. And the more I look at those nineteenth century composers, the the less that's what they wanted. Tchaikovsky is a good example. Our latest um

Sir Roger Norrington2:20

Researchers were into Tchaikovsky and he hated sentimentality, which is what his music is is expected to be. He hated bombast and he hated it people changing the tempo all the time. So he's another very classical composer. His favorite

Presenter2:33

So it's the conductors, is it, who are to blame? 20th century conductors. I think so.

Sir Roger Norrington2:35

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington2:37

I think so. I think what happened was in the early 20th century, music became rather took the place of religion for some people. The religion began to fade rather in the early 20th century. Music became very, very central. And then during the time of the totalitarian regimes, music became totalitarian as well. And a lot of conductors kind of took up the baton in every sense. So I think if you want to become big and grand, you write your name on a balloon. And if you blow the balloon up big enough, your name becomes bigger too, bigger and bigger and bigger. And so if you make music huge and very slow, you will be grand too. But not just.

Presenter3:14

We just

Presenter3:18

But not just conductors. I think you've also you've also uh blamed, for example, Wagner's widow, haven't you, for for ordering his music after his death to be played more slowly.

Sir Roger Norrington3:28

It seems that she only chose, you know, very slow conductors and the and the and the quick ones went out the window, you know, and she wanted to make a a sh a living shrine for his for his memory. It's a it's a common enough thing to to want to do.

Presenter3:34

If you wanted

Presenter3:40

But all of this, of course, has therefore earned you a reputation for taking music at a cracking speed. I mean I think you can knock a couple of minutes off the overture to the Meister singer, for example.

Sir Roger Norrington3:49

Uh more than yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, quite a quite a lot.

Presenter3:52

And Brahm's symphony, first symphony, I think, gets ten minutes knocked off it, doesn't it?

Sir Roger Norrington3:56

Does it? I haven't counted lately. But, of course, we know, for instance, there that the compo the conductors at the time, we know how long they took to conduct it. That's what's interesting.

Presenter4:04

And Vaughan Williams C Symphony, fifteen minutes off that one, I read.

Sir Roger Norrington4:07

So I'm so I'm told, yes. That's really the aim, you know, is to do the sh symphony in the shortest amount of time possible. Maybe we could get it down to the one-minute symphony.

Presenter4:12

Get it done.

Presenter4:13

Now you're being facetious. But the it just shows how slowly they've come to be played.

Sir Roger Norrington4:20

That's because of course the aim of doing the music

Sir Roger Norrington4:23

Faster, and that's only certain movements. Some of them, as we'll see later, are actually slower, is not to do it faster, it's to try and do what the composer was expecting. So if he walked in while you were conducting a piece, he walked in the back and said, Oh, very nice, Noynton, that's exactly what I had in mind. That's what I would like to see happen. Not what is this music? I don't recognize it.

Presenter4:43

Down right.

Presenter4:45

We should have your first record because it's probably an example of exactly what we're talking about.

Sir Roger Norrington4:48

Well, it probably is. I mean, I think it would be wonderful to to have on my desert island uh Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the the opening, the famous opening.

Presenter5:55

The opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, played by the London Classical Players, conducted by my castaway, Sir Roger Norrington, a lot faster than most would take it. How do you know that that's how Beethoven would have wanted it?

Sir Roger Norrington6:07

Well it's very easy with Beethoven because he puts a metronome mark which tells you the number of notes per minute.

Sir Roger Norrington6:13

at the front of every movement of every symphony. So we simply know how fast he had in mind. In fact, um there are conductors who there have been conductors who took it that fast, and the person that I

Sir Roger Norrington6:27

heard conducting this first, I had a record of the fifth symphony with Toscanini, and he was quite a speed merchant. Um he he had a sort of conversion in mid life to uh to he saw the light and uh and became interested in historical speeds.

Presenter6:40

But how did, as I say, the the uh the very conservative Vienna Phil react when you first not that you played the Beethoven with them, but other things surely th they must have thought you were mad when you took them.

Sir Roger Norrington6:51

Yeah.

Presenter6:51

That's how

Sir Roger Norrington6:52

Well, I just did the seventh with them about a month ago, actually, and they they didn't seem to think I was mad, they seem to think it was fine. They're very adaptable, actually. They're extremely adaptable, Vienna. I mean, they

Presenter7:01

But but a lot of vibrato, which again I know you don't like, you try you want to cut the vibrato, don't you? Where did that we should explain what you explained?

Sir Roger Norrington7:04

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington7:05

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington7:08

Yes, well, vibrato is this is this sort of noise kind of vibrating sound which certain instruments use and sort of and singers, certain singers, some more than others.

Presenter7:17

Very much with the violin, one thinks in a different quivers on the screen.

Sir Roger Norrington7:19

Yes, you do. The pitch actually changes from one note to a something a little bit sharper and flatter. That's the problem, so to speak. The fact is it's always been known, but it was not used very much. It was just used on certain notes by soloists until about nineteen twenty when suddenly this was an explosion of vibrating happened. And then some key violinists, Heifitz and so on, wanted to vibrate on every single note, however short.

Sir Roger Norrington7:46

It's something to do with having a steely string, which is much harder sound. Something to do with having a much bigger room. So they tended to want to fill it somewhere.

Presenter7:52

But how do you say to the Vienna Philharmonic, Cut the vibrato?

Sir Roger Norrington7:56

Well, actually, I don't until it really crops up. I mean, the first time I was with them.

Presenter7:57

True.

Sir Roger Norrington8:03

Three years ago I didn't say a single word about vibrato. We just played our Haydn, our Mozart and our Beethoven, and and at the end the leader said Sorry about the vibrato, Maestro, it's the younger players.

Presenter8:14

How do you know that Gluck or Handel or Beethoven or Mozart wouldn't have loved to hear their compositions played as they are in the twentieth century, on rich, deep instruments sung by powerful singers with a vibrato in huge concert halls at these kind of reverential speeds? They might have thought it was terrific.

Sir Roger Norrington8:32

If Beethoven had been alive, yes, he would have loved a modern instrument. His name would have been Stockhausen.

Sir Roger Norrington8:36

I mean, it's simply they would have been different such different people that it was it isn't relevant to their music. I mean, I don't think that all this music should always be played at exactly one speed and exactly one set of instruments at all. I simply wanted to find out what happened if you did, really.

Sir Roger Norrington8:52

Record number two.

Sir Roger Norrington8:53

Well, record number two, I'd like to hear Dowland's In Darkness Let Me Dwell, a wonderful lute song, the sort of thing I used to sing when I was a young man, and the whole sort of world of singing and that world of Renaissance music which I was brought up with.

Speaker 49:31

A ground, a ground shall sorrow, sorrow.

Speaker 49:53

Or borrow O cheerful light from

Presenter10:11

Peter Peirce and Julian Bream performing John Dowland's In Darkness, Let Me Dwell and memories, Sir Roger Norrington, of your childhood in Oxford, you say lot of music, lot of singing in in the house?

Sir Roger Norrington10:22

Yes.

Sir Roger Norrington10:23

A musical family, two my parents were both amateur singers. My mother played the piano a bit. Both sang in the Oxford Bach choir and put up visiting musicians and so on. Oxford's a musical town, of course. So it was a it was a lucky place to be.

Presenter10:36

And did other people come to the house where it was their singing in the evenings?

Sir Roger Norrington10:39

Yes, singing evenings. Yeah, there was a sort of magical circle of um of people in Oxford, sort of eight or ten people who came, I dunno, once a month or something, and occasionally people came and played quartets. So we kind of knew a lot of musical people.

Presenter10:50

So we can

Presenter10:52

But you were very, very tiny then. I mean, this was in this was before the war? No, before the war was.

Sir Roger Norrington10:57

S yes, well certainly when I remember hearing music for the first time in the house, yes, I can remember sort of you know, somebody singing after dinner and

Sir Roger Norrington11:03

and and creeping down the stairs and listening until he had gone, I would not go.

Presenter11:07

But then you were evacuated when you were six with your mother and your sister.

Sir Roger Norrington11:11

Do you remember that?

Presenter11:13

Do you remember the journey?

Sir Roger Norrington11:14

Very well. Nineteen forty, yes, on a on a on a on a passenger ship crammed with women and children.

Sir Roger Norrington11:21

Being sick.

Sir Roger Norrington11:22

And um we hit something near the Canadian coast, I mean a mine or something, and we came into Quebec listing very, very s hard to starboard.

Sir Roger Norrington11:32

Not not uh not a very sensible thing to do, really, in nineteen forty. The next trip that ship went straight down, and after that they packed up, sending women and children to

Presenter11:33

No.

Sir Roger Norrington11:41

Canada quite rightly.

Presenter11:42

And then for some reason you came back all by yourself. Is this right?

Sir Roger Norrington11:47

Well there were a few sailors around.

Presenter11:49

But I mean as a as a boy of ten, not with the family. Oh on a US battleship, is that

Sir Roger Norrington11:55

Uh no, it was actually a Canadian aircraft carrier, yes, in a in a D Day convoy. They they allowed boys over ten to come back and get on with their serious English schooling.

Presenter11:57

Yeah.

Speaker 411:57

Uh

Speaker 111:58

Uh

Presenter11:58

And and a

Sir Roger Norrington12:04

Wasn't that also foolhardy?

Presenter12:04

Um

Presenter12:07

On it in a D-Day convoy. What was it like?

Sir Roger Norrington12:08

Well, I mean that no, the U-boat war was won by then and I mean this was a huge convoy. We saw troops to the front and troops to the back and a a tanker to the left, which was to port, should I say, with the waves sweeping over it in the in the March storms.

Presenter12:23

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington12:23

Yeah.

Presenter12:23

And then uh to Westminster, to school, aged thirteen. What did you intend then? What did you think that music might be a career or was nothing further from your thoughts?

Sir Roger Norrington12:32

It didn't cross my mind, no. I I as far as I was concerned, music was for fun, like like tennis or swimming or something. It was something I was

Sir Roger Norrington12:40

Clearly good at, but um and had been indeed at the Dragon School before that. I sang my first.

Speaker 112:42

Um and had

Sir Roger Norrington12:45

A solo role at the age of ten, I think. A Phyllis in Iolanthe. That was fun.

Presenter12:52

What did you think you might do with your life? Did you have any ambitions?

Sir Roger Norrington12:54

No, I no, I had no I didn't have any ambition and it that worried me. So I just sort of followed along and uh and and um

Sir Roger Norrington13:02

I did my English studies at i at Cambridge, which I enjoyed, and did max masses and masses of music.

Sir Roger Norrington13:07

It it was fine, but I didn't know where I was going. It took me another ten years to discover, I suppose.

Sir Roger Norrington13:13

Echo number three.

Sir Roger Norrington13:16

I would laugh to have my old Schutz choir singing some of this extraordinary music of Heinrich Schutz, who lived a hundred years before Bach wrote about four hundred pieces of church music.

Sir Roger Norrington13:28

and this would be one of them, Wie Lieblich sin dine Vonugen, How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings, written for two separate choirs, one singing on each side of the church.

Speaker 414:01

Okay, well

Presenter14:34

The Schutz choir, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington, performing part of Schutz's Wie Lieblich Sint Deine Vonungen, the choir which you formed, Roger, in in nineteen sixty two, when you finally decided to become a professional musician. Why did you choose Schutz? I mean, virtually unsung, literally, as a

Sir Roger Norrington14:51

Two reasons, I suppose. One one conscious, which is I suddenly came across this amazing composer that I whose music I didn't know at all. I mean, one

Sir Roger Norrington14:59

He's he's right up there with Bach and Mozart and all the other men. He's absolute giant.

Sir Roger Norrington15:04

And that was very exciting. So that was that was reason enough. But I think an unconscious reason is oh I'm always looking for bits of empty field.

Sir Roger Norrington15:15

Pitch my tent. You know, I'm always looking for places where there aren't lots of people already doing things. And so it was great to do music of the early 17th century, in the whole of the 17th century indeed, which wasn't known.

Speaker 115:16

Yeah.

Presenter15:25

You're a frontiersman? I guess so.

Sir Roger Norrington15:27

And also I well, I want to be creative. It's difficult to be creative if everyone says the music goes like this, this is the this is the repertoire you're going to do, and this is the these are the orchestras you're going to do it, do it with, and just do it as well as the lat as well as the recordings that everybody wants to do.

Presenter15:42

So there's no preconceived view there.

Sir Roger Norrington15:44

That's what you're after. It's wonderful to have something new to do. It's right exciting to do new music, for instance, to do modern music, because it hasn't been done before.

Presenter15:53

Do you ring up a composer then of a of a modern piece if you're doing and you've done a lot of premieres, I know, do you say excuse me, how would you like to have a game?

Sir Roger Norrington15:57

Do you see?

Sir Roger Norrington15:59

Absolutely, absolutely. I ask him, or I listen to his recording if it's Ben Britton or Stravinsky or somebody as recently does that. But yeah, I mean people Nicholas Moore or somebody, I I sit with them and say, No, what's this bit about? And why why is it what about this? And can we go faster here? No, no, you can't. Or or whatever.

Presenter16:14

Obey? I obey usually, yes. So what you're objecting to really is is the self-importance of conductors who impose their interpretation on a piece. You're saying they should be truer to the original. Well, I don't want to

Sir Roger Norrington16:27

Come across as objecting to anything, really. I mean, it's just instinctively, I want to try and.

Sir Roger Norrington16:33

as it were, worship the the composer, not the performer. We are the servants of these incredibly great people. I mean, I can't imagine writing anything as

Speaker 116:42

Night.

Sir Roger Norrington16:44

Even as simple as that last motet by Schutz, I mean it's way beyond me. But I can get inside it and animate it like a sort of puppeteer, you know, I can make it live, because otherwise it's only on the page, and that's my job. But I but self-importance, yes, I think that is a danger, but the the trick the trick, the interesting thing about per performing is you've got to believe in yourself to do it. So you've got to be you've got to have a big ego, like an actor, you've just got to have that, but you haven't got to show it. And if you're conducting, you've got to stand up there and animate the orchestra and the chorus and so on. And yet the audience has got to feel that you're doing it for the music and not doing it to show off. So it's a very...

Speaker 117:22

Yeah.

Presenter17:22

So it's a

Sir Roger Norrington17:23

Fine line. You do have to bring all of yourself to a performance, but you mustn't fill the performance with it.

Presenter17:28

You mustn't

Presenter17:30

And why did it take you until the age of twenty eight to discover that that was really what you wanted to do? What did you do until then?

Sir Roger Norrington17:36

Indeed, indeed, what did I do? I well, after after Cambridge, I went into.

Presenter17:39

I will offer

Sir Roger Norrington17:42

My dad's old firm. I mean, he'd gone long before, but but it w I was it was as it was as simple as that. I I thought publishing would be would be a good thing to do. I I've got an English degree.

Speaker 117:45

I was it was

Sir Roger Norrington17:52

Um so I went into the London office of the Oxford University Press and

Sir Roger Norrington17:56

Um I was quite happy there, but all the time, every evening and every weekend and every holidays I was I was making music.

Presenter18:03

Backward number four.

Sir Roger Norrington18:05

Record number four would really take me back to my early days of listening. That would be the Bach's sixth Brandenburg Concerto. And here it's played by the Adolphe Busch chamber players, who it's one of the first recordings ever made of the Brandenburgs, I think, in 1935 or so, in Abbey Road, I think. And it's played absolutely as Bach was thought to be played in the thirties, but of course that's what I heard when I first put this record on, and I can remember sitting in the drawing room in Oxford putting this record on and thinking, wow, so classical music can be fun as well as serious.

Presenter19:39

The Adolphe Busch Chamber players playing part of the third movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. Six, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty five. The third is the the the last era when it was done properly in your book, Rodriette.

Sir Roger Norrington19:51

Well, I don't think Bach was done at all, really, probably before that. I mean, it was hardly played. But do you feel.

Presenter19:56

But you feel it

Sir Roger Norrington19:56

It has a lot to do with dance. People wanting to dance. Oh, yes. Um I think it's marvellously played there, as a matter of fact. I mean I wouldn't do anything different as far as tempo is concerned. But what is what really struck me was this wonderful swinging dance and

Presenter19:58

Oh yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington20:08

Of course, gradually I began to realize that almost all eighteenth and ninth seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century music is inspired by the dance, because dance was the sort of television of the Baroque and classical periods. It's what it's what you did in the evenings. You know, you rolled up the carpet and you danced. You had somebody play the piano, as in Jane Austen, somebody played a violin, or just a lute, or as in here, a band. And everybody danced. That was their entertainment. So I realized that that goes right through to Beethoven, that kind of fundamental feeling that and indeed beyond Beethoven, the fundamental feeling that dance is what music is about, and that's one of the ways in which it speaks to people.

Presenter20:52

So so let's lay lay the blame at uh some people's doors then. You say t Toscanini took Beethoven at the right kind of pace. Who who didn't? What about the big boys, the the the fun carriions and the

Sir Roger Norrington21:04

Von Karion was fairly steady. Klemper, of course, was very, very slow. But when he was young, he'd been very, very, very fast. So it seemed to be an age thing, an age and aggrandisement thing. Footwenger? Footwengler is the guy who really reinvented music. He kind of made it in his own image. Yeah. That was thought to be the way to do music in the kind of twenties and thirties. You know, you recreated it in your own way. You even re-orchestrated it. You rewrote whole bits for trumpets and nobos and strings and things. You actually rewrote the music quite a lot. Mahler did it too.

Presenter21:04

Yeah.

Presenter21:16

Thank you.

Speaker 121:29

In real

Speaker 421:35

If you actually rebuilt some

Speaker 121:37

Uh

Sir Roger Norrington21:40

Rather like if you're going to do a Beatles number now, you you don't do it exactly the way they did it. You you get somebody to do a version for you.

Presenter21:47

But you've talked about the music being industrialized. What do you mean by that?

Sir Roger Norrington21:51

Industrialized, yes. You see, orchestras in uh the in the time of Bach, that would that piece would have been played with one first viola,'cause there there aren't any violins there. One one one one one.

Sir Roger Norrington22:02

In Haydn's day, the orchestra was eight first violins, right up until Brahms' time, but from about 1880-90 onwards.

Sir Roger Norrington22:09

until nineteen thirty the orchestra grew bigger every year, you know, like motor cars. And so now they're twice the size of strings. So now you have sixteen, seventeen, eighteen first violins, and Haydn was used to eight.

Sir Roger Norrington22:23

So it's twice the size and yet the wind the wood wind have stayed the same?

Sir Roger Norrington22:27

So there's a there's an imbalance there. But the industrialization is this kind of huge orchestra with a large industrial master running it and a big, as it were, industrial audience in a big hall. It becomes a big business, whereas music in Pakistan is a

Presenter22:39

Where's m

Sir Roger Norrington22:40

Two or three people sitting around listening to it.

Sir Roger Norrington22:44

I've got to have some Mozart, I've got to have some Mozart opera, his greatest form perhaps. Therefore I've got to have the marriage of Figaro, because it's it's the best of all. Um so let's have uh maybe the tazzetto from Act I of Figaro.

Speaker 423:00

Course we took it for the

Speaker 423:29

In that school.

Presenter23:51

Ingva Vixel, Robert Tier and Mirella Freini singing the terzetto from Act One of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro with the B B C Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davies. Lot of wit, lot of humour. Opera you've done many times, not least of course with with the Kent opera, whom you worked with for fifteen years through the seventies and early eighties.

Sir Roger Norrington24:03

Not

Sir Roger Norrington24:08

Through the 70s and early 80s. We were playing these very, very company-oriented performances in English with very careful and usually new translations, trying to get straight to the heart of the piece and to straight to the heart of the audience. No grandeur, nothing grand, no extra fur below, it's just the piece, you know, and that's exciting.

Presenter24:28

So again, it's about lowering the barriers, isn't it? Letting people in, which is presumably what what the object of your weekend experiences were that you you invented much later on. Tell me how those those worked.

Sir Roger Norrington24:31

Letting people

Sir Roger Norrington24:38

Yes, it's much later on.

Sir Roger Norrington24:41

Well, I wanted to make the audience part of the crew, I think that's one way of one way of putting it. I mean, letting the audience know the kinds of things that I discovered while researching a piece, usually for the first time on original instruments. I mean, it was Beethoven nine.

Sir Roger Norrington24:57

It was um Haydn's creation, which we'd done for the first time on historical instruments, and um it was Brahms and it was Wagner and so on. Each time was the first opportunity an audience had had to hear, and for us the first opportunity, so that there were things we were discovering and which we could share with them.

Speaker 125:06

H

Presenter25:11

Death.

Presenter25:13

But how would it work? You would have them along from a Friday evening until the sun

Sir Roger Norrington25:17

You buy a ticket for the whole weekend, Friday nights, Saturday afternoon and evening, Sunday morning and afternoon. Five sessions, as it were. And you you could w once you'd bought a ticket you didn't have to turn up, you could wash your car instead, but most people came to talk. Talks, meals, dancing, exhibition.

Sir Roger Norrington25:34

Listening to the rehearsal.

Presenter25:35

Listening to the rehearsal. Opening rehearsals. That's it. But it's you talking to the orchestra and finding out how so that by the time they got to the the final performance.

Sir Roger Norrington25:39

So

Sir Roger Norrington25:42

Performance

Presenter25:43

They knew how it had got there.

Sir Roger Norrington25:45

Yes, they were they were and they were also allowed in, you see. That's the other thing, which we really discovered by by by by chance in a way, that the the the barrier, this

Sir Roger Norrington25:54

frightful glass wall there is somehow between uh

Sir Roger Norrington25:57

between the audience and and and the performers up in their funny suits and so on. The audio audiences don't really feel they're allowed in. They're they're they're on sufferance, I feel. They've paid their money, but somehow they're not quite paid up members. They do with the proms. The problems you see immediately that happens. They the the prommers break that break that down. They they they insist on lowering the

Sir Roger Norrington26:15

This curtain. But but weekends, that's the other thing. I didn't really realize that that would happen until after the

Sir Roger Norrington26:22

Event, you know, and people were just thrilled. And just sit, the audience.

Sir Roger Norrington26:27

uh sensation sitting there at the end of two and a half days that you've that you've invested in this piece and in and these people is so incredibly different from a normal concept.

Presenter26:36

We talk about people being delighted and enthusiastic and so on, but quite frankly, you've been booed sometimes.

Sir Roger Norrington26:44

Yes, sometimes.

Sir Roger Norrington26:48

I don't think I've ever been but in the United Kingdom, but in Germany perhaps once and in Vienna maybe twice, yes. So it's exactly one different. And in Italy a lot.

Presenter26:55

So it's actually one difference.

Sir Roger Norrington27:00

It's well, I no, it's not a nice feeling. It's not a nice feeling, even if it's one person, you know, because you feel the malice. You feel the malice. I mean, it must be horrible. It can happen a lot. Next record.

Sir Roger Norrington27:10

I should like to have some balios on my desert island. Um when I came to doing balioz it was with the new coloured glasses of of early instruments and a kind of this this strange early music approach. So I was able to bring new things to it, which some people did didn't like at all, particularly in France, but other people did and it's still one of our best selling records, the Balioz Samphonie Fontastique.

Presenter28:22

The London Classical Players conducted by my castaway, Sir Roger Norrington, playing part of the Marche aux souplice from Belliot's Symphonie Fontastique, going quite slowly, it has to be said, Roger.

Sir Roger Norrington28:32

Yes, I think that we should for the record we should say that some performances, historical performances, are slower. Here it's very interesting because he he puts again a metronome against every mark every movement in this in this symphony, and he was a very good conductor, so it wasn't like he got it wrong.

Sir Roger Norrington28:49

And this one is is doubly, doubly proved, because that's exactly the metronomark that he that he prescribed. But also he says the drum at the beginning, which is going da da da da da da da da da da da for the sort of deathly drum roll, he says should be played with one hand only.

Sir Roger Norrington29:08

And there is an absolute limit to the number of the speed you can't go for. So everybody, what does everybody do now? Does they play with two hands? I think it's wonderful when the piece is is just slow enough to be agonizing on your way after all that he's going to be beheaded, he's going in the tumbril.

Sir Roger Norrington29:26

And I like those kind of proofs. That is exactly what Berlioz intended. I know it.

Presenter29:30

All of this hard work, which patently y you love and you've guest conducted all over America and Europe too, as we've said, all of it came to a a bit of a halt in in the early nineteen nineties when you discovered you had cancer.

Sir Roger Norrington29:43

Yeah, I think melanoma, yeah.

Presenter29:44

Yeah, I had a

Sir Roger Norrington29:45

Yeah, I had a had a big uh sort of brown mark well small brown mark really.

Sir Roger Norrington29:51

And uh I thought nothing of it. And of course nowadays we were suddenly just those few years later everybody knows all about it.

Sir Roger Norrington29:58

Yeah.

Presenter29:59

How does it feel your life though? I mean, did you think you

Sir Roger Norrington30:03

Well, it's a life-threatening illness. It still is a life-threatening illness. I mean, I've been very lucky. I've got a marvelous doctor.

Presenter30:03

Well it's a life threat.

Sir Roger Norrington30:08

In New York, because I had a job there, and I could go and see him often. And he's an extraordinary guy. I had a had a couple of operations, and uh th th this this guy, Nicolas Gonzales, he fights he fights uh the cancer with lots and lots of pills which I take and regimes um various kinds, but it means I can go on working and I have quite a normal life. But

Presenter30:31

It came back in ninety four.

Sir Roger Norrington30:32

Yeah, it came back in ninety four, sure enough, yeah. In fact, it had been there all the time, that's what we discovered.

Presenter30:37

Focuses the mind, I'm quite sure. Has it changed the way you approach your work? Is it in terms of time and balance in your life?

Sir Roger Norrington30:39

2000.

Sir Roger Norrington30:45

No, it hasn't really. I had already planned to to to control the the the the The reckless horse of career, you know, which is which is once you know how it is in this business, you spend 20 years trying to get a job and then you spend the next twenty trying not to be desperately overworked.

Presenter31:02

There ain't no balance.

Sir Roger Norrington31:03

There ain't no balance. So I just have to make a balance. But I already decided to do that before I got ill. So no, I live a perfectly normal life. I'm very active, and some people say I'm too frighteningly active when I'm on the podium. But I found that music is tremendously encouraging, tremendously life-giving. And that I knew about before, but I feel it even more now. Record number seven.

Sir Roger Norrington31:29

I would really love to have some English music on my desert island.

Sir Roger Norrington31:35

Um Elga.

Sir Roger Norrington31:37

would would do that for me beautifully. It is a piece I conduct a lot now in America and and England. I just did the first symphony with Berlin Philharmonic last year. Sounded absolutely wonderful. I would love to have Edward Elgar himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and that that old record he made in nineteen thirty.

Sir Roger Norrington31:55

conducting one of the great symphonies of this century.

Presenter32:53

The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Edward Elgar playing part of the Adagio from his Symphony No. One in A flat, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty.

Presenter33:03

So a desert island, Roger. Um not what you'd require by the sound of it, because you're perfectly happy with life as it is.

Sir Roger Norrington33:10

I don't need uh

Sir Roger Norrington33:13

Much loneliness? No. I I th there's there's enough of it around when you're travelling on your own and or just before you stand up in front of an orchestra. Um but it would be a peaceful place to think about.

Sir Roger Norrington33:24

All the music one's conducted in the need, all the music one hasn't. So I think it it has its attractions.

Presenter33:28

And would you be any good, you know, left to your own devices, left with your own original instruments?

Sir Roger Norrington33:34

Hmm.

Sir Roger Norrington33:35

Getting up a getting up a bamboo pipe or something. Um I'm moderately practical.

Sir Roger Norrington33:41

Um, but I'd be no, I'd probably be dead in about three weeks, I should think.

Sir Roger Norrington33:46

Last record.

Sir Roger Norrington33:49

Um

Sir Roger Norrington33:50

The the astute listener will have noticed that I've

Sir Roger Norrington33:53

Used to have had a piece of music from each major period of music: Renaissance, early Baroque, late Baroque, classical, early Romantic, late Romantic. And of course, that's what I would need on my island. I'd need music from each period of time, and of course, also from the late 20th century, because Elgar actually was written in the twentieth century. There's lots of exciting, way out, modern pieces I could choose, but I'd like to have Britain's War Requiem because.

Sir Roger Norrington34:25

I knew Britton and and Piers indeed, and and it's it's marvellous to have music written by somebody you knew and I was involved in early performances, indeed I'm singing on the on the on the in the chorus of this this recording.

Sir Roger Norrington34:38

And uh this is one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Speaker 434:52

The hands mashed rules by

Speaker 435:06

Feel this glass.

Speaker 435:23

What is this life?

Presenter35:32

Peter Peirce singing part of the Anus D from Benjamin Britton's War Requiem, with the Bach Choir, London Symphony, Orchestra and Chorus, all conducted by Benjamin Britton. That was recorded in the nineteen sixties. Now

Presenter35:44

If you could only take one of those eight records, Roger, which one would you take? I'd take the Bach.

Sir Roger Norrington35:49

Why? It would take me back to the roots of my musical

Sir Roger Norrington35:53

Um training and love.

Sir Roger Norrington35:56

And it dances.

Sir Roger Norrington35:59

I could dance around the island with it.

Sir Roger Norrington36:02

What about your book?

Sir Roger Norrington36:04

Complete works of Thomas Hardy.

Sir Roger Norrington36:06

What about your luxury?

Presenter36:07

Yeah.

Sir Roger Norrington36:07

Chocolate

Presenter36:07

Uh

Presenter36:08

Something you can't get on a desert island.

Presenter36:11

Sir Roger Norrington, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Roger Norrington36:15

Real pleasure.

Speaker 136:23

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.