Romantic that I am, I bought my wife some roses last week. They're now all dead. They still have the look of roses - the stems, the thorns and even the petals. But the petals are shrivelled up and the stems dried out.

I wonder if Sir Roger Norrington, who is to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, has any flowers at home. I do hope not. Because if Sir Roger's approach to flowers matches his approach to music, the ambience in his home will be devoid of any joy.

Let me explain. Sir Roger will conduct Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1, also known as Land of Hope and Glory. Or rather, he is to conduct his own version of it. Because he will ask the orchestra to play it without vibrato - the technique whereby violinists add colour to a note by gently vibrating the finger holding down the string.

That's where my wife's roses come in. Elgar without vibrato is the musical equivalent of dead roses. It's like an omelette without yolks.

Sir Roger says he wants to “play one of Britain's most patriotic pieces as its composer intended”. Last week he showed what this meant in a Proms performance with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of Elgar's First Symphony. To hear the orchestra's vibrato-less performance was to hear it with the soul ripped out. As Professor Raymond Cohen, of the Royal College of Music, put it: “Norrington calls this a ‘fresh' approach to music, but you can call anything ‘fresh' and it is still disgusting. If Elgar heard that performance, he would have turned in his grave.”

That's not just an assertion. We can only speculate about the sound of Beethoven's orchestras, but we have Elgar's recordings of his music to listen to, and the vibrato in those is positively intense. There is nothing historically aware in Sir Roger's version of orchestral sound, just a man with a bizarre fixation ruining the music he conducts. Sir Roger is a pioneering musician who has done wonders to bring about a new understanding of historic performance techniques. He was the first to record a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies played as they would have been performed in Beethoven's time. But like so many pioneers, Sir Roger has started taking his argument too far. Not only is he now a laughing stock; he is doing a disservice to the composer he is conducting.

Why does this matter? Sir Edward Elgar is, I would argue, the greatest of all British composers. His music is already labelled by some as “imperialist” and “jingoist”, which reveals only the ignorance of those making the accusation. But far, far worse than that would be if those listening to Sir Roger's screeching, unmusical performances thought they were listening to Elgar. That would be to dance on Elgar's grave.

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