One downside to being a certified maverick, as the conductor Roger Norrington has been for at least half a century, is that people may be disappointed when you produce something excellent but actually not very wacky. So it was with his admirable but pretty conventional interpretation of Dvořák’s New World Symphony with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra – the estimable band on which (as former principal conductor) he used to inflict some of his more eccentric notions.
Would he double the usual speed of the allegros? Would he require the cellos to use toothpicks for pizzicatos? Would he position the trombones in the middle of the violas? No? What a letdown.
What he did was inspire a performance Dvořák himself might have loved: punchy, grandly sonorous and even rambunctious in the big moments (pity the horns had some bad luck), but imbued with delightful subtleties and a folkish ingenuousness elsewhere. In particular, his handling of the first movement’s gorgeous flute tune — allowing time for an excellent player to articulate the rhythms charmingly, then getting the strings to match it, note for note — seemed as authentically bohemian as anything I have heard from a Czech orchestra.
The slow movement was beautifully nuanced, with a ravishing cor anglais solo and then pianissimo strings producing a viol-consort effect hovering a notch above silence. What a pity that some in the audience chose these ethereal moments to let out a barrage of fortissimo coughing.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony was a more characteristically provocative Norrington interpretation. The strings, playing with a wiry, minimal-vibrato timbre, were reduced in numbers in many places to suggest the ripieno/tutti effects of baroque concertos. On the other hand the woodwinds were doubled, so that their interjections carried a sledgehammer punch. As expected, Norrington also opted for helter-skelter speeds in the other movements. That led to some loss of detail, but also produced an irresistible ebullience.
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Between the two symphonies, randomly, came the “Romeo alone” movement from Berlioz’s epic Romeo and Juliet symphony. It was well enough played, but eclipsed by another French piece played as an encore: a velvety performance of the prelude from Fauré’s Pelleas et Mélisande.