Roger Norrington, who has died aged 91, was one of the great pioneers of the early music revival. With his acute sense of cultural history and performance tradition, he was one of a handful of conductors who radically redefined the realisation of music of earlier periods.
Launching his career with the Schütz Choir, dedicated to the promulgation of the 17th-century German master Heinrich Schütz, he gave attention to principles of performance practice. Similar principles were then applied to the classical repertoire when he founded the London Classical Players in 1978, though gradually the ensemble encroached on later and later repertoire, bringing historical informed performance to music of the 20th century.
