Sir Roger Norrington: 'I'm against music being handed down from on high'

It is typical of Sir Roger Norrington that one of the greatest highlights of his long orchestral conducting career was when the audience burst into laughter in the middle of one of his performances.

As a rule, conductors stand on their dignity. They take themselves seriously. They like to be revered. In his own idiosyncratic way, Norrington himself is all three: dignified, serious and revered. But he is also a lot of fun. He wants to connect with his audience. So when his listeners laughed out loud at a musical joke during his performance of a Haydn symphony, he was not offended but delighted.

“I thought – yes!” he says. “I love things that break the ice in concerts. I love it when the audience feels confident enough to respond. When that happens, you know the evening is going to be a good one.”

Now aged 82 – “I forget names but fortunately I don’t forget tunes,” he confesses – Norrington will be back at the BBC Proms this week with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he was principal conductor for 13 years up to 2011. His programme of Berlioz, Beethoven and Brahms may seem a traditional one. Yet Norrington’s approach, as ever, will be anything but.

That’s partly because Norrington has very particular, historically informed views of how an orchestra should sound and be arranged. In a Norrington performance, there is no vibrato – he wants his strings and winds to play with “pure tone” not “wobble”. In this repertoire, also, the first and second violins face each other, rather than sit side by side. If the string sections are doubled, as they routinely are in a modern orchestra such as the Stuttgart, then the winds are doubled too, to ensure balance, even when the score only calls for a single player. “It’s perfectly historical,” says Norrington. “Mozart did it.”

It’s also a fair bet that on at least one occasion on Thursday evening, Norrington will turn around on the podium to face the Albert Hall audience and give a questioning shrug, as if to say “What about that then?” It’s something he does a lot, just as he often gives little talks about pieces he is about to perform.

“My wife, Kay, ticks me off about it,” he says. “But I find most people really like it. I’m saying, ‘Isn’t this a wonderful piece of music?’ I’m saying that I want the audience to feel they are part of the concert. I want them to applaud at the end of movements, if they wish to. And I’d love it if people applauded in the middle, like at a jazz concert. I’m against music being handed down from on high. I play for the joy of it.”

When I told a friend who has known Norrington for years that I was going down to his home near Exeter to interview him, I asked if there were any special tips. “Just wind him up and set him going,” my chum advised. “He’ll do the rest.”

And the advice worked. Sitting in his garden, I ask Norrington about Brahms’s first symphony, the main piece in Thursday’s Prom and one of the great symphonic reference points of the 19th century, a piece Brahms worried over for years. Norrington purrs at the very thought of it. Then he talks about Brahms and his symphony, utterly fascinatingly, for nearly half an hour.

“People think of Brahms as rather an academic symphonist,” he says. “I think he really is nothing of the kind. I think Brahms was very heart-on-sleeve. I also think Brahms’s symphonies are extremely autobiographical. Not in a crude or explicit kind of way, of course. But the first symphony is a work full of loneliness. It’s full of his feelings for Clara Schumann and his dilemmas about the future. He wrote that anxious, almost frightened slow introduction in 6/8 time the last of all. I think of it as a response to the death of Robert Schumann, a great musician who was married to the woman he adored.”

The first symphony, thinks Norrington, is the piece in which Brahms works through his feelings for Clara and accepts, finally, that he must put his duties to music first. “I think the second movement is really saying, ‘I love you, Clara.’ And the third movement is all jolly middle-class games in the park, with Brahms the good stepdad. But then in the final movement, the tragedy of the Schumann connection returns.”

The last movement contains the heart of the dilemma. It starts, tragic and grand, in troubled minor-key mode. Then comes a horn and flute call in C major, which Brahms once included on a postcard to Clara with loving words of greeting. That is followed by a steadying chorale for the trombones, which has been linked to the influence on Brahms of his friend, the great violinist Joseph Joachim.

“And at that point Brahms makes his decision,” says Norrington. “He decides not to marry Clara, but to be apart, free but happy, as he put it later. And out pours a nice middle-class melody that dominates the rest of the movement. It’s saying, ‘Yep, now I know who I am. I am respectable middle-class Johannes Brahms. I’m not going to be a wild romantic and a slave of Clara. I’m going to do what my friend Joachim says. I’m going to write great music.’ Or at least that’s the film that I always conduct at this point.”

Norrington is no longer the fixture in British musical life that he once seemed. His move to Exeter two years ago has coincided with a reduced workload. But he says he still has the ambitions of a man half his age.

“I should be working with a London orchestra five or six times a year, of course I should,” he tells me. “I’d still love to be a chief guest conductor with one of the orchestras I sometimes work with, the Philharmonia or the London Philharmonic. But maybe to play with pure tone is too difficult to handle in their tight schedule.”

Are there new works he still wants to conduct? Norrington’s reply is dramatic. “I’d love to conduct a Wagner opera at Bayreuth with an orchestra that could play with pure tone. There was a point when Nike Wagner was up for the job there that it might really have happened. Parsifal would be wonderful. Tristan would be wonderful. It’s an exciting thought.”

It certainly is. Surely there is someone, somewhere in Europe – or in Britain best of all – who shares that ambition to hear Norrington at work on the great Wagner operas and has the backing to make it happen? In the meantime, though, there is always Brahms this week to be going on with.

“Once you have heard the 19th-century repertoire this way, you don’t want to hear it any other way,” says Norrington over lunch in his courtyard. “You don’t need to giftwrap music. Vibrato emphasises everything that’s on the outside of the music. But pure tone tells you what is on the inside. That’s a good remark. I haven’t put it that way before. Make a note of that one.”

• Roger Norringson conducts Prom 17 at the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday 28 July. Tickets are available here.