By
Published: Monday, 02 December 2024 at 12:42 PM
Neville Marriner: the conductor who turned millions on to Mozart
The New Yorker magazine once ran a cartoon featuring two parrots whose vocabulary has been pilfered from the radio. One says, ‘That was the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’; the other adds, ‘conducted by Sir Neville Marriner’. And that the joke worked in a publication with a general, worldwide readership was telling.
Throughout more than half a century, the Academy and Marriner were joined umbilically into an uber-brand, commanding instant recognition in the universe of music. Together they toured the world, endlessly. Together they made more recordings than any other conductor/ensemble partnership in history, their only serious rival being Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil.
And although he eventually passed the Academy’s artistic direction over to Joshua Bell, Marriner remained closely involved as Life President until life left him in 2016 – continuing, as his son Andrew understatedly puts it, to be ‘mentioned in dispatches’ whenever the ensemble gets a name-check.
When was Neville Marriner born?
The dispatches were in overdrive earlier this year as Marriner’s centenary celebrations kicked in. And at the heart of them was a series of concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Wigmore Hall, the Festival Hall and Lincoln Cathedral, flagging the city where Neville Marriner was born on 15 April 1924 into a modest but musical family.
His father, a carpenter, was also the organist at the local Methodist chapel, which meant that the young Neville was raised in a culture of robust hymnody and annual Messiahs before leaving to study violin at the Royal College of Music. Thereafter he freelanced in post-war London: playing with chamber music ensembles, rising through the ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra to lead the second violins (see the clip below, with the great Leonard Bernstein conducting). And that’s where he was in his life when a young woman called Molly – later to be Lady Marriner – walked through the door of the apparently ramshackle house in Brook Green he was sharing with others in the music business – one of them writer John Amis.
Now in her happily vigorous mid-90s and living in deepest Dorset, Molly Marriner recalls going to visit Amis at that house ‘which was called Divorce Corner because almost everyone was going through matrimonial traumas, Neville included. And we met on terms that weren’t exactly a passionate love affair. He needed help organising his life, work and children. I could type, so I volunteered, unpaid. And I was still volunteering, unpaid, as he set up the Academy and it took off.’
‘He was very charming when he could be bothered’
That Neville Marriner had the ability to draw people like Molly into his ambit was the product of a charismatic geniality that never left him and determined his relationships with players. ‘He could make you laugh,’ says Molly, ‘however angry or fed up you were. And he was very charming when he could be bothered. But that aside, his greatest talent was being able to recognise a good thing when it came his way and seize it. I was the good thing at that moment.’
In 1958 they married. And it was the following year, when they were living in a flat in Cornwall Gardens, Kensington (still owned by the family, with the name N Marriner still on the door), that the Academy of St Martin’s began – established by informal gatherings in their sitting room.
‘We’d clear the furniture,’ recalls Molly, ‘and Neville’s friends would come round to play, for their own amusement, trying out repertoire. There was no plan for public concerts, and I can’t imagine what the neighbours thought of the noise. Probably not a lot.’
Neville Marriner and St Martin-in-the-Fields
The repertoire they were exploring was essentially Baroque. This meant Handel, Purcell and assorted Italians – Locatelli, Torelli, Corelli – that Neville called Ice Cream Merchants. In 1950s Britain much of this was unfamiliar. And Marriner’s interest was spurred by the musicologist Thurston Dart, a friend he’d met in a military hospital where they both recovered from wounds sustained in wartime service.
By Marriner’s own account Dart was ‘the most important person we knew’, acting as a sort of academic mentor to this group of young, inquiring players. But comparably important was John Churchill, the person they brought in as a keyboard player when the initially all-strings ensemble started to embrace other instruments.
He happened to be the organist at St Martin-in-the Fields where, in 1961, it was eventually arranged for Marriner’s group to make their concert debut, borrowing the church’s name in the process. And the name stuck – causing confusion ever after as the outside world (particularly visiting Americans) assumed the building was their home and turned up at St Martin’s looking for them.
In truth, they were hardly ever there: as the Academy grew famous, they made their money from international tours, only occasionally surfacing in London. So, the relationship with St Martin’s was loose – although it was the venue for their first ever recording, which Molly Marriner remembers ‘happened at dead of night, in the two hours between when the buses stopped and started again.
‘She paid in cash: five pounds per player from a leather satchel’
‘It was all thanks to an Australian woman who had acquired great wealth through what we thought was sheep farming, though it turned out to be linoleum, and used it to set up [record label] L’Oiseau-Lyre. She paid in cash: five pounds per player from a leather satchel. Things were different then.’
It proved to be one of the opportunities that Neville seized – making disc after disc with a repertoire that expanded rapidly from Ice Cream Merchants to Mozart, Tippett and Schoenberg. And as the size of the Academy grew to accommodate bigger scores, so Neville Marriner’s role changed.
From their earliest days, the group saw themselves as escaping the tyranny of conductors – with Neville merely leading from the violin and encouraging ‘everyone to have their say, then do it my way’, as he put it. But an expanded ensemble of sometimes 60 players called for more. ‘Waving a violin bow was useless,’ recalls Molly. ‘And things came to a head when there was an issue and a player said, “For God’s sake, Neville, either stand somewhere we can see you or somewhere we can’t.”’
‘Why do you stick out your bottom when you want pianissimo?’
The result was conducting lessons, which Marriner had never had until he booked into an American summer school run by Pierre Monteux. It proved a formative experience, shared by Molly who remembers Neville being asked by the maestro, ‘Why do you stick out your bottom when you want pianissimo?’ But more significantly, it was where he learned the unfussy up/down stick technique that stayed with him ever after.
Monteux abhorred flamboyance, insisting that his students contain their gestures within an imaginary box. And Marriner took the lesson to heart, becoming a ‘boxed-in’ conductor with a reputation for prioritising clarity over emotion.
To be more exact, he thought (according to Molly) that ‘emotion happens in rehearsal, where I say how I feel. Then, at the concert, I just beat time and the orchestra have the emotion.’ But he absorbed Monteux’s dictum that conducting was for the musicians, not the audience.
‘He transformed English string playing for the better’
And for Andrew Marriner, who played clarinet with the Academy under his father, ‘the precision was helpful: it’s a tougher job to pick the bones out of a more expressive beat. Maybe he didn’t delve into emotional depths, but for a player there’s nothing worse than conductors who exhaust the emotional content 100 per cent by themselves. It’s a more balanced experience if they hold back.’
Holding back became a route to the Academy’s distinctive sound: exact and polished, with what Andrew sums up as ‘ensemble, intonation, preparation – everyone stylistically on the same page. I think he transformed English string playing for the better. And he certainly cleaned up Baroque playing – though he wasn’t prepared to take the next step of period instruments. He didn’t like the raw sounds they made then.’
According to principal viola Robert Smissen, an Academy musician for some 40 years, Neville Marriner’s stance on period performance was emphatic but considered. ‘He would spend a lot of time preparing parts and editing, and he was against the lugubrious Romanticism that had overlaid Baroque playing for decades. But there was a particular sound that he wanted, and it wasn’t “period”. As everyone was freelance, with no ongoing contracts, you came to the Academy on the understanding that you played his way.’
Travels to America
In that respect, the Academy shared common ground with another band, the English Chamber Orchestra who were establishing themselves at much the same time – and also holding out against the emerging religion of ‘authenticity’ – in what could have been territorial rivalry. ‘But dad had a generosity of spirit that didn’t do rivalry,’ says Andrew Marriner.
‘And anyway, the ECO had a different ethos – working with stars like Daniel Barenboim who had their own ideas, and associated with Britten whose world was something else. Dad had sometimes played for Britten in the early days but there was an embarrassing catastrophe – he overslept and missed a morning rehearsal – so it was a relationship that was never nurtured.’
Neville’s relationship with the Academy went on hold in 1966, when he took charge of the well-funded Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (remembered by Molly as ‘walking into a fairyland of swimming pools, houseboys in white coats, orange trees in tubs. Being a puritan, I hated it’). And from 1979-86 he ran the Minnesota Orchestra (‘Better for me,’ says Molly; ‘not so opulent’), immediately followed by a stint with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and bouts of guest conducting across the globe. But the Academy always reclaimed him; and with that enduring bond, he never cultivated the sweeping maestro manner of a Karajan or a Solti.
His humour could be devastating
‘He was not the great “I AM”,’ says Molly. ‘He just felt he had been lucky.’ ‘And there was a lot of luck,’ adds Andrew, ‘from surviving that wartime wound and finding himself in a hospital bed next to Thurston Dart, through to the way he carried on conducting, almost to the day he died, in his 90s. But he also made his own luck.
‘He had an ability to galvanise people and make them enjoy the experience – which was a gift of temperament. The sense of humour people mostly loved, although it sometimes fell with devastating effect on flustered latecomers rushing into a rehearsal. “No, no, please get comfortable, enjoy your last engagement with the orchestra” was a line that everybody knew.’
‘He could, in truth, hire and fire,’ Bob Smissen says, ‘because the players never had security in the Academy. But at a personal level he was a generous human being: he cared, especially if you were in trouble. So the mercurial side came without malice. He was fun to be with.’
And he liked fun, even at his own expense – as Molly Marriner recalls of a misunderstanding that occurred late on in life when he was guest-conducting in Japan. ‘We were backstage before a concert, Neville half into his trousers, when the dressing room door opened and people trooped in with gifts and long speeches in Japanese. Neville was famous in Japan, so we assumed they were showering him with praise. When we discovered it was for National Respect the Elderly Day, he laughed so much. But then, he always did.’
A Neville Marriner discography
If one thing sent the ‘brand’ of Neville Marriner and the Academy worldwide it was their output of some 600 recordings, seizing the moment as the golden age of classical LPs took off. At their heart was a founding repertoire of Italian Baroque that culminated in their legendary 1969 recording of Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons. But as the Academy grew, so did the scope.
In the 1960s came Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, followed by Tippett’s music for strings, which later became the soundtrack to Peter Hall’s film Akenfield. And in the ’70s came Mozart: the piano concertos with Alfred Brendel, and a set of early symphonies that Marriner ranked among his ‘most rewarding’.
He felt more equivocally about a pairing of Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings with Grieg’s Holberg Suite, adopted by British Airways. ‘Every time you get on a plane,’ he said, ‘you hear it as you struggle to get your luggage in the rack. It haunts me.’
Something else destined to haunt him, more agreeably, was the 1984 soundtrack for Miloš Forman’s epochal Mozart biopic Amadeus. It enjoyed massive sales and bolstered the Academy’s Mozartian credentials – leading to a Mozart opera series in the 1990s.
- Amadeus features in our list of the best (and worst) classical music films ever made
Opera, though, was never prominently on the schedule: it demanded too much time for someone whose relentless work-ethic propelled him from one project to the next.