Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a musician. He's spent his career playing the music of the great

composers the way he thinks they would want it played. The result has been not dry

and authentic, but surprisingly modern. He didn't become a professional musician

until he was 28, but since then with the Schutz Choir, Kent Opera and the

London classical players, he's brought the Baroque, Beethoven and beyond to new delighted audiences.

Even such bastions of conservatism as the Vienna Philharmonic have fallen for his charms.

People put music on an altar and worship it, he says. It can be great for them, but

hard luck on the music sometimes.

He is Sir Roger Norrington.

It's easy to think, Roger, that musicians like you who research music and want to use period instruments are very academic, very stuffy, frankly, but your ambition is to be completely the opposite, isn't it, to cut the waffle?

Absolutely, it is a curious combination of things.

You become historical to be new and you go back in order to go forward.

But it's all very iconocastic because you also, I think, don't mind if audiences applaud in the wrong places

like in in between movements and so on. You just can't... I want them to enjoy it.

I mean most music is is fun or enjoyable I mean there is some of which is deeply serious

and tragic which is quite unsuitable for as it were fun but most music was written to

entertain people and until fairly recently it had to entertain people

or the composer would simply die of starvation. There were no arts councils until very

recently. So it all begs the question really who put the pompity into it in the first place that you're stripping out?

Yeah I think it really happened in this century as a matter of fact. I don't think it happened in the 19th century.

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