It’s hard to think of another conductor of recent times who has polarised opinion more sharply than Roger Norrington. On one side were those who admired his indefatigable research into 18th- and 19th-century performance practice, and the ways in which he deployed the results in his work with the period instruments of the London Classical Players, often extending the idea of historically informed performance beyond its then restricted field of the classical era into the orchestral music of Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms and Wagner. On the other side were those who viewed Norrington’s “experiments” as at best eccentric and at worst as profoundly destructive, especially when he carried over those ideas, such as his hatred of string vibrato, into his work with the many traditional symphony orchestras that he conducted throughout his career.
Both those aspects of his conducting life are well represented in the many recordings – well over 100 - that Norrington made. Another significant aspect of his work, as an opera conductor (especially in the 1970s and early 1980s with Britain’s first regional opera company, Kent Opera, of which he was the founding music director) is less well represented however and in this selection of Norrington’s recordings, the Don Giovanni, a later product, has to stand for that important contribution.
