Pioneers and mavericks... the founders of historically informed performance
The death in July 2025 of the irrepressible maverick conductor Roger Norrington almost completes a melancholy roll-call – at least for me. When I first started writing about music and musicians, nearly half a century ago, Norrington was one of many radical spirits, nearly all now dead, who were intent on revolutionising how Renaissance, Baroque and even Classical-era music was performed.
The magic word they used was ‘authenticity’. Later, that emotive term – implying that everyone’s else’s approach was inauthentic – was replaced by ‘historically informed performance’. Nowadays, even that is regarded as a bit provocative. Every performer with integrity is ‘historically informed’ to some degree. But back in the 1970s and ’80s the ‘authenticity brigade’ – led by the likes of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Christopher Hogwood and Norrington – combined shock impact, scholarly certainty and an almost religious zeal for what they claimed was the only correct way to interpret older music.
Historically informed performance... an uncompromising and divisive mission
It was uncompromising for a while. Vibrato was out of the question for string players and singers. Instruments had to be exactly matched to the period of the music being performed. That meant players had to relearn the techniques to play those old woodwinds, valveless brass instruments and gut fiddles with their curved bows. So, intonation was often a problem, though the best period instrumentalists quickly improved that.
But in any case, that was a side-issue. The big claim was that, for the first time in centuries, we were hearing the music of Bach, Handel, Monteverdi, Mozart and Purcell (and, later, Beethoven and the Romantics) as they would have heard it. That apparently licensed a startlingly different attitude to speeds, embellishments and even pitch as well as timbre. Norrington famously applied Beethoven’s own metronome markings to his symphonies, with sometimes bizarre results. Harnoncourt turned the Sanctus of Bach’s B Minor Mass from a grandiose swagger into a skipping dance. Provocative, but hugely entertaining.
And of course it was deeply divisive within the profession. As critics and audiences warmed to this new-old approach, ‘normal’ symphony orchestras found themselves virtually frozen out of a huge chunk of their repertoire. Crucial recording contracts for massive projects – complete Bach cantatas, or all the Haydn symphonies – went to the rising period-instrument bands. No soprano got a job singing Handel unless she sounded like Emma Kirkby.
Historically informed performance in the '90s... a new flexibility
Then, perhaps in the 1990s, the scene changed again. A new generation realised that ensembles didn’t have to be either/or when it came to instruments and techniques. The way forward was flexibility – cultivating a chameleon-like ability to change their sound to suit different periods. Another impetus came from listeners. Those early pioneers of authenticity had a puritanical determination to purge their performances of any trace of what they regarded as romanticism. They seemed to regard it as an achievement to get through a piece of Baroque music without a single crescendo, diminuendo or ritardando – all seen as anachronistic 19th-century ‘varnishes’ besmirching the music’s purity. After a few years, however, this bleached approach began to bore even those doing it.
And actually, the notion you could perform a piece of old music precisely as it would have been played when it was written, without interposing any sort of 20th-century sensibility, was, as people started to point out, in itself a very 20th-century fallacy. It would never have occurred to performers of any earlier century that they ought to perform music in any style except their own. That was one reason for a general drift back to more romanticised performances. But just as important was a sense of ambition. The best period-instrument ensembles wanted to demonstrate their expressive capabilities, not merely perform the notes fluently.
Historically informed performance... have we come full circle?
So have we come full circle in half a century? In one way yes. I often hear period-instrument bands these days piling on even more expressive nuances than modern instrumentalists in the same repertoire. But that’s not to belittle what those mischievous iconoclasts such as Norrington achieved. They opened our minds and our ears to new ways of playing old music. Some of what they did was unconvincing. But even then, they made us think. We could do with a new generation of provocateurs like them.
