Llewellyn moves on but not out

The British conductor Sir Roger Norrington joins the masthead of the Handel & Haydn Society next season as artistic adviser, part of a reconfigured artistic team. Grant Llewellyn leaves as music director but remains active with the Society with a new title, principal conductor, and conductor laureate Sir Christopher Hogwood continues in that position. Norrington, 72, has agreed to serve for two seasons (through 2008) during the search for a new music director.

Llewellyn, music director for the last five years, is not so much stepping down as stepping aside. Mary A. Deissler, executive director of H&H, explained Friday, ''We hope to continue our relationship with Grant, and just today we were talking about a project for 2010. Our notion is that he will keep his new title beyond next year. A lot comes down to scheduling. The other organizations Grant works with, the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Orchestra of Wales, can plan three years ahead, and we aren't in a position to do that.

''We don't learn the available dates for our principal venues, Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, until after the planning of Grant's other institutions is well underway. Grant is a busy guy, and Roger and Chris are busy too, so it's hard to schedule them for our dates. There is, however, a new model for shared artistic directorships -- at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in England, and in this country at the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, so we are excited to try it here."

Before Friday night's opening of H&H's production of Purcell's ''Dido and Aeneas," Llewellyn explained some of the reasons why he began to reconsider his relationship with H&H. ''I am now spending 22 or 23 weeks a year in the United States, which means leaving three teenage children, one 10-year old, and one wife, without me back at home in Wales, so there is a domestic issue. Also I think it is only healthy for musicians of the H&H caliber to have new faces in front of them. And my current schedule leaves few windows of opportunity to work elsewhere, which is not good either for me or for the organizations I work with most of the time. It is the right time for me to change direction a little, and maybe for the Society. I will always delight in working with this chorus and this orchestra."

Llewellyn will lead three of next season's programs, including a staging of Monteverdi's opera ''Orfeo" by Chen Shi-Zheng, who directed ''Dido and Aeneas." Hogwood will lead one program, and Norrington will preside over two, leaving three programs for guest conductors who may be candidates for the music directorship. In addition to leading his own concerts, Norrington will help plan the next two seasons and assist in the music-director search.

Norrington is currently chief conductor of the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart and the Camerata Salzburg, but he has been an intermittent guest of the Boston Symphony Orchestra both here and at Tanglewood, and was a major presence in three of the early editions of the Boston Early Music Festival (1987-1991). He was a leader in the historically informed performance field with early instruments; in recent years he has explored those principles with standard orchestras playing modern instruments.

Norrington always provoked controversy and sometimes courted it, which is an attraction both to Deissler and Llewellyn.

''Roger is brilliant and likes to mix things up," Deissler says. ''Some of our singers and instrumentalists who worked with him at the Boston Early Music Festival remember how seminal those experiences were."

Llewellyn says, ''With his seniority and global view of the profession, Roger will certainly bring something special here, and he is still a force in the land. He is the most outspoken member of that generation of early-music pioneers, so he will stir things up in a very positive way."