Capturing a moment

Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’

In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians regarded by the wider profession as, to put none too fine a point on it, rather nutty. They included his British colleagues Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock, the Dutch harpsichordist Ton Koopman and recorder player Frans Bruggen, the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken, and, from a slightly older generation, the iconoclastic Austrian conductor and viola da gamba player (and noble descendent of European royalty) Nikolaus Harnoncourt and another Dutch harpsichordist, Gustav Leonhardt. All were united in their determination to ditch received wisdoms, deconstructing accepted norms of performance practice and putting it all together again using as their only tools instruments and treatises from the same epoch as the music they were playing.