Innovator, erudite, entertaining and acclaimed conductor Sir Roger Norrington founded the Schütz Choir, became founding music director of Kent Opera and established the London Classical Players, the period-instrument orchestra.

His recordings of historically informed Beethoven’s complete symphonies with the later that opened his collaboration with EMI received unanimous critical acclaim. The success led to a busy and productive recording programme that covered music from Purcell and Handel to Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner, encompassing orchestral works, choral works and opera. A rich and varied collection of recordings released under EMI, Virgin and Warner Classics that illustrates the Guardian’s observation: “arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century … a man who has emphatically changed classical music for the better.”

Sir Roger Norrington: The Complete Erato Recordings (45CD) brings together all the recordings that the British conductor Sir Roger Norrington (b.1934) made for EMI Classics, Virgin and Warner Classics Classics over the years from 1986 and 2004.

These recordings marked out Norrington internationally as an important and pioneering presence in the field of historically informed performance, particularly in the music of Beethoven and composers of the Romantic era. He achieved prominence at a time when ‘authentic’ performance had been focused primarily on music of the Classical, Baroque and Renaissance eras, i.e. pre-Beethoven.

Norrington’s impact was summed up in 1989 by the New York Times:

“The English conductor Roger Norrington … has become about the hottest commodity in classical music … the most talked-about star of the early-music movement, which is devoted to the historical re-creation of the sounds and styles of performance akin to those the composer heard in his own lifetime. He has achieved this prominence partly through the widely recognized excellence of his interpretations, but also by his eager enthusiasm in pushing forward the chronological limits of the movement into familiar 19th-century Romantic repertory. Mr. Norrington isn’t playing ‘early music’ any more … but mainstream classical standards in a fresh and enlivening manner … No-one has been more admired in this repertory than Mr. Norrington, who has combined brisk tempos, dramatic accents, interpretive niceties and a lively responsiveness to period timbres into one vibrant package.”

When, at the age of 87 in 2021, Norrington gave his last-ever concert, the Guardian described him as “arguably the most important British conductor of the last half century … a man who has emphatically changed classical music for the better.”