Only Poetry Played Here

By Michael Walsh

Roger Norrington is preparing to leap into the air.

"Danger here!" he shouts.

Like an airplane gaining altitude, the prominent nose tilts skyward; the hands beat the air in preparation for flight.

"Too soon!" he cries.

Up goes the monk's balding pate, the scholar's red beard, the halfback's broad shoulders.

"Swing it!" he exorts.

With a radiant look of joy creasing his face, the conductor breaks the bonds of gravity.

"Dance!" he commands.

And, as one, fourscore of London's best musicians waltz deliriously.

It was an animated diorama of 1830s concert life, a full panoply of period instruments thrillingly revived under the banner of musical authenticity. Assembled on the stage of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall last week were ranks of gut-stringed violins, wooden flutes, valveless horns, leather-headed kettledrums and even a pair of ophicleides (bass keyed bugles since supplanted by tubas). Standing before them, feet on the ground but soul in the sky, was Norrington, at 54 newly emergent as a formidable leader in the early-music movement.

This was not the well-trod turf of Bach, Mozart or even Beethoven that Norrington's crack London Classical Players were venturing onto, but the terra incognita of Hector Berlioz, the virtuoso French composer who in the 1830s revolutionized symphonic sound in such works as the hallucinogenic Symphonie Fantastique and the blazing choral symphony Romeo et Juliette. "Our goal is to present a view of Berlioz very different from modern received opinion," Norrington told the audience before the performance. "We're not like a symphony orchestra playing notes. We only play poetry here."

The weekend series of concerts on the south bank of the Thames was billed as the "Berlioz Experience." Californian in nomenclature but quintessentially British in structure, the intensive three-day festival of concerts and lectures featured readings of the Fantastique and Romeo on original instruments. Moreover, it was the first time in more than a century that this music has been given voice in the same distinctive timbres that Berlioz was hearing in his head when he wrote it.

In Norrington's vigorous hands, the result was a revelation. The Fantastique, premiered in 1830, just three years after the death of Beethoven, is an opium-tinged odyssey through the composer's psyche as he pursued his mad passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Its restless opening, brilliant ballroom scene, desolate pastorale, terrifying march to the scaffold and cackling witches' sabbath bloomed anew, while the 1839 Romeo et Juliette, Shakespeare transformed into sound, burst with hot-blooded vitality.

When the music is played by a homogenized modern orchestra, its raw power is sanded away along with its rough edges. Hearing it is like watching a colorized film: the superficial enhancement is more than offset by the loss of nuance and detail. But on early instruments, the flutes purr, the oboes squawk, the brass barks, and the strings alternately cajole and bite. "This is not a pureed, strained cup of tea that you might drink in the back of a limousine," says Norrington. "This is a bracing beverage quaffed in a well- sprung vehicle."

Myriad details emerge: the skittering piccolo, singing out over the thundering trombones at the end of the Fantastique finale; the raw, plaintive solo of the cor anglais in the slow movement, forlornly wailing in response to the ominous, muffled strokes of the timpani; the four harps forming a powerful voice in the whirling waltz. Berlioz -- and such contemporaries as Weber, Schumann, Mendelssohn and even early Wagner -- can, and should, never be heard the same way again.

The foray into Berlioz marks a bold step for Norrington, who began his musical career as a tenor, founded the amateur Heinrich Schutz Choir in 1962 and was music director of the Kent Opera for more than 15 years. But it was not until he conceived his "Experiences" three years ago (first Haydn, then Beethoven) that the Oxford-born, Cambridge-educated musician achieved his current eminence. Norrington's contribution to the original-instruments movement is to push its boundaries forward from the Baroque and Classical periods into the mid-19th century. "Modern orchestras sometimes don't play Beethoven very well," he observes, "but they generally play Berlioz very well indeed. So it was a real risk for us."

Performing on a mix of originals and reproductions, Norrington's 80-player ensemble is made up of London free-lancers, many of whom also play in similar bands like the Academy of Ancient Music and the English Concert. In rehearsal, he leads his players with forceful gestures, cries of encouragement and vivid, running pictorial images that mirror the music's story. "It was only a passing shower," he tells the strings in the Fantastique's adagio. "Now you might live again . . . supposing she is with somebody else . . . you're exhausted . . . what Berlioz says about this part is that the drums define the silence."

Norrington is just as effective with the public, addressing the festival audience with the easy urbanity of a BBC talk-show host. At an open rehearsal, he gave the downbeat for the combative fugue that opens Romeo, then stopped after a few minutes to quip, "It's like riding the foot-plate of a steam - locomotive."

His newfound status has widened his scope. This year Norrington will lead the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood and conduct the Messiah in San Francisco; his North American dates are booked through 1990. Next year's "Experience" subject is still under discussion, but Schumann is a likely candidate. It is an apt choice: conventional widsom says that Schumann was an inept orchestrator whose four symphonies are flawed by treacly instrumental writing. For Norrington, though, such wisdom is both hidebound and earthbound. "Take nothing for granted," he says. "That's my motto over the door." Perhaps Schumann too can soar.