In September 2016, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of the SWR (RSO) merged with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden- Baden and Freiburg and formed the new SWR Symphonieorchester which is headquartered in Stuttgart.

The Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1945 and in the following seven decades developed as one of the most important musical ambassadors of Germany. It performed around 80 concerts per season in the SWR broadcasting area, in addition to national and international guest performances and performances at world-wide music festivals. The Stuttgart RSO focused on one hand towards the large classical and romantic repertoire that is represented by exemplary performances, and, on the other hand, towards contemporary music and rare musical works, including little-known composers. The sponsorship of young artists also belonged to the Stuttgart RSO undertakings, as well as the development of sophisticated music for a younger audience.

World-renowned conductors, as well as some of the world’s greatest soloists, have been guests of the Stuttgart RSO, including: Carlos Kleiber, Ferenc Fricsay, Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hans Knappertsbusch, Sir Georg Solti, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Kurt Sanderling, Gary Bertini and Herbert Blomstedt, as well as Maria Callas, Mstisław Rostropowitsch, Maurizio Pollini, Yehudi Menuhin, Alfred Brendel, Hélène Grimaud, Anne Sophie Mutter, Elina Garanča, Rolando Villazon, Hilary Hahn, Sol Gabetta and Lang Lang.

Sir Roger Norrington has been the principal conductor of the Stuttgart RSO from 1998 to 2011 and its Conductor Laureate after 2011. Norrington has succeeded in giving the orchestra its unmistakable image through the use of historically informed performances coupled with the implementation of the resources of a modern symphony orchestra. His work emphasises the symphonic cycles of works by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and Elgar. Hans Müller-Kray and Carl Schuricht made their marks as the first conductors of the Stuttgart RSO. From 1972 to 1982, Sergiu Celibidache was the creative director. Through his intensive and evocative rehearsals, he developed a new sound that would characterise and capture the ambiance of the moment, a way of performing that would set standards for many years and that led the Stuttgart RSO to become one of the world’s finest orchestras. Sir Neville Marriner und Gianluigi Gelmetti were principal conductors of the Stuttgart RSO in the 1980s and ’90s. Georges Prêtre took over creative direction in 1996. From 2011 until 2016 Stéphane Denève was as principal conductor leading the Stuttgart RSO.

Born into a distinguished Oxford family which was musical as well as academic, from the age of ten Roger Norrington studied the violin and was a keen amateur singer. He won a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature and participated in the university’s vigorous musical life: in addition to singing he was active as an instrumentalist and conductor, and studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal College of Music. After graduating from Cambridge he went into publishing but continued to conduct, forming the Schütz Choir in 1962. His musical activities were halted when his employers sent him to work in Africa; but here he decided to make his future career in music and after returning to England he became a professional singer and conductor, leading numerous concerts and recording works from the seventeenth- and nineteenth-century choral repertoires with the Schütz Choir for the Argo record label. The choir was often accompanied in concert by the London Baroque Players.

In 1969 Norrington took up the post of chief conductor of Kent Opera, remaining with this company for fifteen years and conducting a wide repertoire of forty different works, a fact which helped to prevent him being narrowly labelled as a musical specialist. He made his debut with the English National Opera with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1973, and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden with Handel’s Samson in 1986. He has conducted opera in Italy at La Scala, Milan; La Fenice, Venice; and at the Maggio Musicale, Florence; as well as in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam. In order to pursue the performance of a wider repertoire on period instruments than was then usual he formed the London Classical Players in 1978; the orchestra’s programme of concerts was often supplemented by popular ‘Experience’ weekends, during which interpretation and performance were examined in depth. In addition Norrington conducted the London Classical Players in a highly praised series of recordings for Virgin and for EMI (after its acquisition of the Virgin label) which included the complete Beethoven symphonies as well as orchestral works by Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Smetana, Weber and Wagner. Conductor and orchestra also toured widely, visiting Germany, France, Holland and Belgium, and in 1989 they appeared in the USA and at the Salzburg Festival.

Norrington’s research into original scores and into the size, seating and playing style of the orchestras of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a remarkable influence on the way music of this period is both perceived and performed. He has been particularly vigorous in his pursuit of reducing the amount of vibrato used by string players in symphony orchestras. ‘It’s one of my missions to make this way of playing freely available to any intelligent musician,’ he has commented in interview. He has appeared with many of the major orchestras of Europe and the USA as a guest conductor, suggesting different ways of performing the traditional symphonic repertoire. His permanent appointments have included those of chief conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta (1985–1989) and chief conductor of the Orchestra of St Luke’s in New York, (1990–1994); he became chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1998 and of the Camerata Salzburg in the same year. In 2006 he took up the position of artistic adviser to the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, one of North America’s leading period performance groups. In England Norrington works closely with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was principal guest conductor in the mid 1990s, and with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which took over the work of the London Classical Players in 1997, the year in which he received a knighthood.

Norrington’s career has developed in an outward progression from musical specialist to acclaimed international maestro. He has effectively harnessed contemporary academic ideas of period performance to concerts and recordings in ways that have attracted wide interest and popular enthusiasm, and above all he has successfully bridged the potential divide between conducting orchestras that use period instruments and those that use modern ones, bringing new ideas to both. His discography accurately reflects all these progressions. While most of his recordings have many different points of interest, those of the complete Beethoven and Brahms symphonies are especially notable, as are his accounts of the Symphonies Nos 4 and 6 of Vaughan Williams. His operatic conducting is less fully represented on disc, but his accounts of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen are good examples of his strengths in this field.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

Edward Elgar was arguably the leading English composer of his generation and a significant figure among late-Romantic European musicians. Born in the west of England in 1857, the son of a piano-tuner and owner of a music shop, he earned his earlier living as an organist, violinist and teacher in his own part of the country. After his marriage in 1889 he found himself able to move to London as a composer, but success only came later, after his return to the West Country, confirmed by the ‘Enigma’ Variations, first performed in London in 1899. Knighted in 1904, he wrote relatively little after the death of his wife in 1920.

Choral Music
Elgar wrote a number of oratorios and works for chorus and orchestra. These include The Apostles and The Kingdom, and the cantata Caractacus. The most significant of all is The Dream of Gerontius, with words by Cardinal Newman, a remarkable study of a man on his deathbed. Sea Pictures, an anthology of songs for contralto and orchestra with texts related to the sea, was written in 1899 and won contemporary success. His earlier compositions include music for the Catholic church in Worcester, where he followed his father as organist.

Orchestral Music
The ‘Enigma’ Variations, with its portraits in each variation of one of the composer’s friends and its unsolved musical puzzle in the ‘hidden’ theme which apparently spans the whole set, is one of the best-known of his works. Still more familiar, if less substantial, must be the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ Marches. His concert overture Cockaigne is an evocation of London, while the Elegy, the Introduction and Allegro and the Serenade, all for string orchestra, offer music of the highest quality. Elgar’s Cello Concerto, written in 1919, enjoys great popularity, not yet matched by that of the earlier Violin Concerto, composed before the war. Elgar’s two completed symphonies are comparable, at least, to the work of other great symphonists of the period. He left sketches for a third, now conjecturally reconstructed.

Chamber Music
Elgar wrote a number of pieces for violin and piano during the earlier part of his life. Of the smaller pieces that survive, Chanson de nuit and Chanson de matin have considerable charm. Of much greater weight are the three chamber works of 1918, the Violin Sonata in E minor, String Quartet in the same key, and Piano Quintet in A minor.

Keyboard Music
Elgar wrote relatively little for the piano, but his Salut d’amour (‘Love’s Greeting’), originally written for his wife and bearing a German title, has proved popular both in its original form and in a multitude of arrangements. As an organist himself, he wrote a few works for the instrument, including a Sonata and some voluntaries. A second organ sonata was arranged, under his supervision, from his Severn Suite. His piano music includes a number of short pieces, as well as a keyboard version of his ‘Enigma’ Variations.

Gustav Holst, of Scandinavian ancestry on his father’s side, was born in the English spa town of Cheltenham in 1874 and studied music at the Royal College in London, using his second study, the trombone, to provide an income. He later became director of music at St Paul’s Girls’ School, retaining this connection until the end of his life. His music had a variable reception in his lifetime, but he exercised a strong influence on later English composers.

Stage Works

Holst wrote a number of works for the theatre, their subjects reflecting his varied interests, from Hindu mythology to Shakespeare and the medieval world of the Wandering Scholar. From his final chamber opera The Perfect Fool, first staged in 1923, with its parodies of Verdi and Wagner, comes a better-known ballet suite. The opera itself is seldom performed.

Vocal and Choral Music

As a choral conductor, Holst wrote a considerable amount of choral music, accompanied and unaccompanied, including arrangements of folksongs and a smaller number of solo songs.

Orchestral Music

By far the best known of all Holst’s compositions is The Planets, a sequence of seven movements, reflecting the composer’s interest in astrology and the generally attributed qualities of each. ‘Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity’ provided the melody for a popular patriotic hymn, while ‘Mars, The Bringer of War’, suggests the period of the work’s composition: between 1914 and 1916. For string orchestra he wrote the St Paul’s Suite, completed in 1913, and in 1933 the Brook Green Suite. The two suites for military band were written in 1911. His Suite de ballet, Op. 10 was written in 1899 and revised in 1912.