David Owen Norris’s unique blend of pianism and presentation (as demonstrated in his autobiographical recital Lifting the Lid) has brought him to countless television screens around the world, starting with a ninety-minute BBC programme on ‘authentic’ performance back in 1990 (here’s a clip, setting out the dilemmas of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) with David Wilson-Johnson. Eerily still relevant: enjoy it!), and most recently including six seasons of Chord of the Week which made the BBC’s Proms Extra the most-watched classical music programme in the world. The importance of his media work was underlined recently when the National Sound Archive at the British Library accepted a complete set of audio recordings of all his BBC broadcasts from 1972 till the present, on the grounds that they were of national importance.
Sample his films for the LSO: Elgar’s Enigma 1, Elgar’s Enigma 2, and Schumann.
Perhaps his most celebrated sequence is his deconstruction of Parry’s Jerusalem in The Prince and the Composer, a programme on Sir Hubert Parry presented by HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, and directed by John Bridcut: first broadcast in 2011 and frequently repeated. Here are some of the reviews.
Richard Osborne The Oldie
David Owen Norris should be on our screens talking about music every week. Fifty short prime-time films by him would re-educate the nation for a generation.
The programme’s other gem was a breathtaking sequence in which the irrepressible David Owen Norris laid bare the prodigious skill and imagination that went into the making of ‘Jerusalem’. Presented to camera from the keyboard, it was a tour de force. Norris should be on our screens talking about music every week. Fifty short prime-time films by him would re-educate the nation for a generation.
It was Norris who defined the nature of Parry’s ‘Englishness’ over which the Prince agonized with several uncomprehending interviewees. His answer: reticence mingled with deep emotion in a quasi-coded language which the English love and understand.
David Butcher Radio Times
There are also ear-opening insights. Few people can unpack a piece of music better than David Owen Norris, and if you don’t fancy the whole hour and a half, tune in for his captivating analysis of Jerusalem about 40 minutes in. You’ll never hear it the same way again.
A.A. Gill Sunday Times
The joy of this programme was the deconstruction of the music by choristers and musicologists, in particular, a simply marvellous chap called David Owen Norris, who explained the ethereal nuts and bolts of Jerusalem with the panache and fizz of a rhythmic vacuum-cleaner salesman. Somebody needs to sign this man up for a series on why we love the music we love, right now.
As to radio, in addition to his innumerable broadcasts as a pianist, Owen Norris has been a speech broadcaster since he presented Radio 3’s The Works from 1989-91. He was a regular member of the team presenting In Tune, the drive-time show, from 1992-98. His radio work is now chiefly focussed on the Playlist series and on Building a Library, but his other series and one-off programmes have included All the Rage and Gramophones & Grooves on Radio 4, and In Memoriam:1934 and Ten Tales from the Great War on Radio 3.