Dwoje Paszportowców
Po raz pierwszy, na scenie Ogrodów Muzycznych, wystąpili wspólnie Artur Ruciński, śpiewak uznany, i Gabriela Legun, wschodząca gwiazda. Łączy ich – poza pięknym śpiewem – to, że oboje są laureatami Paszportów „Polityki”.
Sopranistka to laureatka najnowsza; baryton otrzymał naszą nagrodę 16 lat wcześniej, a ówczesną uroczystość pamięta wielu redakcyjnych kolegów, ponieważ pan Artur był jedynym, który przy tej okazji… zaśpiewał. Uzasadnienie przyznania Paszportu było takie: „…za konsekwentne budowanie kariery w Polsce i podnoszenie poziomu spektakli na naszych scenach operowych”. W wywiadzie wówczas artysta powiedział, że nie ma jakiegoś szczególnego parcia na zagranicę, choć „jeśli to się wydarzy, będę się cieszył, bo chciałbym pracować z wybitnymi dyrygentami i reżyserami”. I ostatecznie tak się stało, jego kariera wyszła w świat, na najlepsze sceny, a w Polsce bywa gościem. Ale za to zawsze to jest święto – nawet w tak niesprzyjających warunkach, jak namiot z nagłośnieniem na dziedzińcu Zamku Królewskiego.
Zawsze słyszało się w jego interpretacjach pewną dojrzałość, teraz jest jeszcze wzbogacona szerokim doświadczeniem. Jego głos jest świetnie umiejscowiony i postawiony, ze znakomitą emisją. Także jako osobowość sceniczna Ruciński jest bardzo wyrazisty, buduje postać również teatralnymi środkami.
Gabriela Legun to inny przypadek: żywioł. Głos ma po prostu przepiękny, natura była tu bardzo szczodra. Artystka w mniejszym stopniu używa aktorstwa, jakby chciała udowodnić, że treść roli zawarta jest już w samej muzyce – i przecież rzeczywiście w dużym stopniu tak jest. A już zwłaszcza w jej wykonaniu: słuchając jej Rusałki czy Desdemony człowiek po prostu się wzrusza i nawet się nie zastanawia nad tym. Jej śpiew jest absolutnie naturalny i to jest jego dodatkowe piękno.
Choć są tak kontrastowi, świetnie wypadali w duetach. Bardzo adekwatni byli w swoich rolach w wielkiej scenie Violetty i Germonta z II aktu Traviaty, a także w duecie Mimi i Marcella z II aktu Cyganerii. Wesołym akcentem na koniec był duet Là ci darem la mano, i to mimo iż Gabriela Legun nie jest typem Zerliny, ale i tak włożyła w swoją interpretację mnóstwo wdzięku. Najsłabszym ogniwem koncertu był niestety pianista Marek Ruszczyński, choć ustosunkowany; zwłaszcza uwertura do Mocy przeznaczenia i aria Una furtiva lagrima zawierały mnóstwo „sąsiadów”. No, ale trudno.
Pani Gabriela w najbliższych miesiącach zmienia plany (np. nie zaśpiewa na Wratislavii ani na kontrakcie w Hamburgu), bo na wrzesień spodziewane jest rozwiązanie; już ogłoszono, że będzie synek. Powiedziała mi jednak, że planuje wrócić do roboty jak najszybciej będzie mogła – już w grudniu zamierza śpiewać w Operze Narodowej Paminę, a w styczniu także Mimi – wymiennie z Aleksandrą Kurzak. Za wszystko trzymamy kciuki.
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Sir Roger Norrington, RIP.
Tutaj niemal w calosci (bo za paywallem) nekrolog z NYT. Bardzo piekna biografia.
Roger Norrington, Iconoclastic British Conductor, Dies at 91
His work, largely unknown outside Britain until late in his career, was often based on historical treatises. It was seen by many as refreshingly innovative.
By Allan Kozinn
July 19, 2025
Roger Norrington, the English conductor who became a star of the historically informed performance movement by provocatively applying research about tempos and tone production to a broad expanse of the symphonic repertoire, from Beethoven to Mahler and even the modernist Stravinsky, died on Friday at his home outside of Exeter, England. He was 91.
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Mr. Norrington was known for his brisk, lively and often audacious performances of Handel, Mozart and Haydn before he turned his attention to Beethoven and Berlioz; after that, he forged deeper into the 19th and early 20th centuries. He led both period-instrument and modern orchestras, using the same interpretive principles, and though some of his performances drew criticism for their brash iconoclasm, many listeners regarded them as insightful and refreshingly original.
Lanky, bespectacled, bearded and balding, Mr. Norrington projected both affability and authority, and he loved making the case for his ideas — not only in interviews but also in seemingly off-the-cuff comments at his concerts. He often cited centuries-old treatises as well as his delight in the “pure” sound, as he put it, of strings playing without vibrato. He once famously referred to vibrato as “a modern drug.”
Toward the end of his career, he preferred to conduct while seated, usually on a high swivel chair that allowed him to turn to the audience to smile conspiratorially at a light moment within the music, and even to encourage applause. He was known to tell audiences that they could applaud between the movements of a symphony or a concerto, a common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries that is frowned on today.
He reveled in being provocative. In a 2021 interview with The Telegraph, he referred to his 2007 recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony as his “last hand grenade.”
International fame came late to Mr. Norrington. He had built a solid reputation as a choral conductor in the 1970s, when he made a series of well-received recordings with the Heinrich Schütz Choir, an amateur group he formed in 1962 and named after the German Baroque composer. He was also the founding music director of the Kent Opera, England’s first regional opera company, established by the singer Norman Platt in 1969.
Yet he was scarcely known outside Britain until 1987, when he released revelatory recordings of the Beethoven Second and Eighth Symphonies. They were the first installments of a complete cycle with the London Classical Players, a period-instrument ensemble that Mr. Norrington founded in 1978 and led until 1997.
“I was happy to take things slowly,” he told The Telegraph in 2021. “I didn’t conduct a Beethoven symphony until I was 50. So when I finally stood up in front of the great orchestras of America and Europe as a guest conductor, I actually knew what I wanted. And this meant I could relax and treat music-making as something that is full of love and laughter.
“It’s not about consecrating a sacred object,” he continued. “It’s about exploring and being curious and having fun.”
Mr. Norrington’s first Beethoven recordings were striking in their adherence to the composer’s metronome markings, which most conductors have considered impossibly fast or, in a few cases, impractically slow. The recordings immediately found a large audience, and by the time the cycle was complete, in 1989, Mr. Norrington’s career was white hot.
Roger Arthur Carver Norrington was born in Oxford on March 16, 1934. His father, Arthur Norrington, worked for Oxford University Press and later became the president of Trinity College, Oxford, and the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. Roger’s mother, Edith Joyce (Carver) Norrington, was a gifted amateur pianist.
Roger studied the violin as a child and sang in choirs as a boy soprano. When he auditioned for a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe,” he won the lead role.
“I realized I had some sort of gift,” he told The Guardian in 2007. But, he added, “I thought I would be like my parents and spend my life doing music in my spare time.”
When he entered Clare College, Cambridge, after completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, it was to study English literature. Nevertheless, he performed with — and, in his final year, conducted — student ensembles.
After graduating, Mr. Norrington became an editor at Oxford University Press. But he continued to sing in choirs and to play violin in orchestras and chamber groups. When a new edition of choral works by Heinrich Schütz was published in 1962, he became so eager to conduct the music that he formed the Heinrich Schütz Choir.
Despite the choir’s name, its repertoire extended from the Renaissance through the 20th century, and it quickly won enthusiastic reviews and a following.
It was not until Oxford sent him on a six-month posting to Nairobi, Kenya, late in 1962 that he resolved to devote himself fully to music. When he returned to Britain, he left his job and enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied composition, music history and conducting (with Adrian Boult) and played percussion in the orchestra.
Recordings by the Austrian period-instrument specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt led Mr. Norrington to reconsider his ideas about conducting and orchestral sound. They also inspired him to read treatises by 17th- and 18th-century musicians and to seek out musicologists like Thurston Dart, who shaped his ideas about the performance of early music.
Mr. Norrington’s success with the Schütz Choir led to his appointment as music director of the Kent Opera in 1969. By the time he stepped down, in 1984, he had conducted more than 400 performances with the company, in repertoire that ranged from Monteverdi to Michael Tippett.
In 1986, he established the Early Opera Group with the choreographer Kay Lawrence. He and Ms. Lawrence married that year. A previous marriage, to Susan McLean May, ended in divorce in 1982.
Mr. Norrington reconstituted the Schütz Choir as a professional ensemble in the mid-1970s and also formed a period-instrument orchestra, the London Baroque Players, for performances of Monteverdi and Bach. The success of his Baroque concerts led him to move more deeply into the world of period instruments and historical performance practice, and to move ahead to works of the Classical and early Romantic eras. He reconfigured his Baroque orchestra as the London Classical Players and began reconsidering the symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven.
One of his innovations was the Experience, a weekend-long series of lectures, exhibitions, demonstrations and performances in London that were meant to present the historical, artistic and social contexts of individual works. The first series, in 1984, was devoted to Haydn’s “Creation.” Others examined Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s Requiem.
After his Beethoven recordings won him a large international audience, Mr. Norrington began performing regularly in the United States. He made his New York debut in 1989 at Carnegie Hall, leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a modern-instruments orchestra. Writing in The New York Times, Will Crutchfield described Mr. Norrington’s performance of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony as “exhilarating, witty, precise, full of verve and subtlety, fully convincing as to tempo (using Beethoven’s markings with some modification for practicality’s sake, rather than throwing them out as most conductors do) and wonderfully played.”
In addition to novel tempos and the absence of vibrato, Mr. Norrington considered a balance of intuition and scholarship essential to his interpretations. He rebelled against the notion that one could recreate historical performance styles by merely playing what was written on the page. And he inveighed against those who treated performances as museum pieces.
“A performance is for now, and one instinctively tailors it for today,” he said in a 1989 interview, adding, “To say that you don’t put your personality into it is rubbish.”
Mr. Norrington recorded prolifically, covering a broad swath from Schütz to the contemporary British composer Nicholas Maw. He won a Grammy Award in 2001 for his recording of the Maw Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell and the London Philharmonic.
In addition to his work with his ensembles, Mr. Norrington was chief conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta from 1985 to 1989; chief conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s from 1990 to 1994; chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2011; chief conductor of the Camerata Salzburg from 1997 to 2006; and principal conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra from 2011 to 2016. He was artistic adviser to the Handel and Haydn Society, in Boston, from 2006 to 2009.
“A performance is for now, and one instinctively tailors it for today,” Mr. Norrington once said, adding, “To say that you don’t put your personality into it is rubbish.”Credit…Richard Termine for The New York Times
In November 2021, after Mr. Norrington conducted his farewell concert — leading the Royal Northern Sinfonia, in northern England, in an all-Haydn concert — The Guardian called him “arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century” and “a man who has changed classical music emphatically for the better.”
He was knighted in 1997. Other honors include Commander of the British Empire and Cavaliere of the Italian Republic.
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“My story, from 1962, has been one of knocking down wall after wall and seeing what happened,” Mr. Norrington told The Guardian in 2007. “So to discover right at the end that these great traditional European and American orchestras can be part of it as well has been wonderful. Now even they are beginning to realize you don’t need to put vibrato on everything, like sugar. I know that I’m still the only conductor that really asks them not to.”
He added: “So if, on the day I die, the world is playing without vibrato, of course I will be delighted. But even if they aren’t, I’ll still be delighted because at least I did.”
Amisha Padnani contributed reporting.
Dzięki, jrk. Pamiętam, jak na początku lat 90. słuchaliśmy jego Beethovena z Ludwikiem Erhardtem (rówieśnikiem zresztą Sir Rogera) i też zdumiewaliśmy się tymi tempami i faktem, że to metronomiczne oznaczenia kompozytora.