Amadeus, Elgar, a bogus gold disc and Goldie Hawn: Neville Marriner’s best recordings
As a five-year-old, I sat spellbound on the stairs outside our living room. The furniture had been removed to to make space for a handful of string players, there to rehearse and play with no end in mind other than the pure pleasure of making music. The conductorlessstring chamber group founded by my father Neville was named “The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields” (ASMF), after the church in which it rehearsed, and gave its first concert in the Trafalgar Square church on 13 November 1959.
I well remember the excitement when test pressings arrived of recordings by the newly formed group. Theirs was a fresh approach, bringing to works normally performed by the larger and weightier orchestral forces a sparkling clarity and refinement of balance – a style that characterises the Academy’s playing to this day.
When I later became a long-time player with the orchestra, I had the good fortune to enjoy the ride from within, witnessing my father’s ability to shape and guide the ensemble he directed until well into his 80s, with his customary mix of stringent musical demands and boundless and infectious good humour.
Neville made more than 600 recordings over five decades. Here’s a handful of my favourites.
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Handel - Chandos Anthems (1966) ASMF/Willcocks, led by Neville Marriner
As a boy chorister in Cambridge, I was in the choir when the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields were commuting along the Parade between the choirs of King’s and St John’s Colleges, making a total of 22 recordings with the two of them. Neville formed a lasting friendship with the emerging “Schola Cantorum Pro Musica Profana in Cantabridgiense”, and advised the choral group not to make the same mistake he had with an impossibly unwieldy name. They changed it to the King’s Singers and that seemed to work …
Strauss – Metamorphosen (1969) ASMF/Marriner
Strauss’s In Memoriam for his beloved Dresden, so recently destroyed when he wrote it in 1945, is a work of extraordinary emotional power. This is a musical challenge at the best of times, given the individual technical demands made on the 15 solo string players; to achieve the same intensity on a studio recording is difficult without straying into a sentimentality that would not stand the test of repeated listening. The early efforts were not really getting the desired results and time was pressing. How to get this “in the can”? An extended break was called and with limited session time left the players produced this performance in one complete take (with one small edit for extraneous noise, I’m told).
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Janáček – Suite for Strings, Strauss – Sextet from Capriccio, Suk - Serenade for Strings (1975)Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra/Marriner
In 1968 Neville was founder director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, where he fulfilled two important ambitions: one, to meet and play chamber music with the great Jascha Heifetz and the other, to meet Goldie Hawn.
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Vivaldi – the Four Seasons (1970) ASMF/Marriner with Alan Loveday (violin) and Simon Preston (harpsichord, organ continuo)
This best-selling recording nearly didn’t happen. The ceiling in Holborn’s Kingsway Hall collapsed and there was a scramble to find a new venue, leading to the hitherto untried St John’s, Smith Square in Westminster. Perhaps this is the best-known of the Academy’s recordings, awarded a gold disc for sales of 750,000 in its first couple of years. The gold disc was received in triumph, but when Neville attempted to play it, he found that the recording underneath the gilding, despite its congratulatory label, was one conducted by Mantovani not Marriner!
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Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending (1971)ASMF/Marriner with Iona Brown (violin)
Recorded in Kingsway Hall, in Holborn, central London, which had one of the great acoustics for classical recordings, with one small drawback. “All was going well; Iona and the Academy were playing beautifully, and this was the magic take. Then, right at the end, as Iona’s final note was fading away into nothingness, a tube train rumbled under the hall. Hearing it through the headphones, Stan (recording engineer) turned to Mike (producer), his face contorted in agony: “Just the wind in the trees, Stan,” muttered Mike – and that is how the record ends, with the “magic take” and the Lark, ascending to the rustle of windblown leaves on the Piccadilly line.” (From The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields by Meirion & Susie Harries).
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Mozart – Requiem in D minor (1977)ASMF and ASMF Chorus/Marriner
The addition of a virtuoso Academy chorus was celebrated most often on annual tours of Germany. The chorus was trained by László Heltay in a way that entirely complemented the Academy style, and audiences were ecstatic. As a clarinet student in Germany at the time, I could hear at first hand why the Academy was so feted abroad on these whirlwind tours, and why it became the first (and, to date, only)orchestra to be given in 1993 the Queen’s award for export achievement.
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Amadeus – Original Soundtrack Recording (1984)ASMF/Marriner
“Only two people were qualified to conduct Miloš Forman’s Amadeus – one was unavailable” ran the slogan on the poster for the film, with a picture of Neville and Mozart side by side. Symphony 25 opens the film that became an Oscar-winning sensation. The collaboration with Forman took place in airport lounges around the world and on Neville’s tennis court; the resulting cohesion of music and film was achieved by recording the music in its entirety before shooting the film, an unprecedented but successful experiment.
Elgar – In the South (Alassio), Symphony No 1 in A flat (1990)ASMF/ Marriner
Neville rarely listened to his recordings, but this was an exception. I can picture him in his beautiful country cottage, volume on the player turned up to the maximum, relishing how well the sound was captured and how the small string group that had been the Academy had evolved into a flexible ensemble able to play the large symphonic repertoire with all the skill and commitment of its youth. For me, this recording is a happy memory of all my years with the orchestra. The spectacular opening passage of “In the South” is overwhelming; Neville loved it and it was the obvious choice to be the affirming music at his funeral, a celebration of a wonderful life.
• BBC Radio 3’s Marriner Day celebrates the British conductor on what would have been his 100th birthday, 15 April, with archive recordings, stories and memories on all programmes, and culminates with the live broadcast of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields’ Celebrating Neville Marriner concert. The ASMF with Joshua Bell also celebrate their founder in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on Thursday 18 April