Sir Neville Marriner
Conductor who transformed the classical music scene with his Academy of St Martin in the Fields
SIR NEVILLE MARRINER, who has died aged 92, was the founder and conductor of the world’s most recorded orchestra – the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, a band which revived the chamber ensemble as a viable alternative to the big symphony orchestras, and forced orchestras everywhere to improve their act.
For energy and output, Marriner had few equals. He made more than 600 recordings of 2,000 musical works, a greater legacy than any conductor except Karajan. These included the soundtrack for Milos Forman’s film of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which introduced more new listeners to classical music than any film since Fantasia. A cartoon in The New York Times neatly summed up his achievement. It showed a parrot listening to a radio announcer: “That was the Academy of St Martin in the Fields…” to which the parrot responds: “…conducted by Sir Neville Marriner.”
He began his musical career in the early years of the war when, as a student at the Royal College, he was drafted in to the second violin section of the London Symphony Orchestra, many of whose permanent players were on active service. He played under Henry Wood: “We’d play two Messiahs; morning at the Albert Hall, afternoon in Kilburn or somewhere.” The standard, he recalled, was abysmal.
Things improved only marginally after the war when London orchestras, the LSO in particular, gained a reputation for insubordination – of which Marriner, by now the leader of the LSO’s second violins, acknowledged he was as guilty as anyone. He travelled to concerts with another violinist who had served in the RAF and owned a Tiger Moth: “One day we took a lot of flour-bags up with us and bombed the LSO bus on the road from Brussels to Ostend.”
In 1959, increasingly disenchanted by the indiscipline and mushy string sound of the LSO, he got together a group of friends who used to gather at his flat and play chamber music for fun, and founded a chamber ensemble with himself as lead violin. They called it the Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields (the hyphens would be dropped in the 1980s) after the Trafalgar Square church where they performed.
The managing director of the newly founded L’Oiseau Lyre record label came to their first concert and signed them up on the spot. Their recordings of Mozart, Haydn and Vivaldi won enthusiastic reviews and brought them invitations from concert halls and studios around the world.
The Academy’s fresh, technically brilliant, interpretations of the pre-classical and classical repertoire were a revelation, though they provoked a reaction from a younger generation of purists who adopted original instruments and sought a more “authentic” sound. The Academy’s keyboard player Christopher Hogwood broke away to form a rival Academy of Ancient Music.
Marriner, however, saw no reason not to exploit the riches of modern instruments and techniques. As one critic observed: “Listening to Marriner shading the opening arpeggios to Zadok the Priest as if they were ushering in Das Rhinegold, one had to acknowledge that this is not the way Handel is performed at earnest earlymusic festivals in Belgium. But then ‘So what?’ ” Rather than wrangle over authenticity, Marriner moved on to the Romantic and early-modern repertoire, enlarging his group from 45 to 70 and taking up the conductor’s baton.
While his main rivals were sustained by Arts Council grants and teams of managers, Marriner ran the Academy entirely without subsidy, with the aid of his wife, Molly. He had little time for subsidised, salaried orchestras, not only because of their unionised attitudes but because they distorted the market.
The Academy was heard more regularly in Germany, where ticket prices are much higher, than in London, where they once made a loss of £32,000 on a sell-out concert at the Festival Hall.
The Marriners treated their players as family. When the Austrians hauled a Czech violinist off the train for not having the right papers, Marriner refused to conduct until the man was freed. Players were selected for musicianship, but the most important test was one of character: “If they are miserable devils, they don’t get invited back.”
The Academy transformed the classical music scene to the extent that London now has three chamber outfits for every symphony orchestra, a development repeated all over the world. In America, Marriner founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The Academy also set a standard of musicianship that the larger orchestras felt constrained to match.
In a world dominated by peacocks and super-egos, Marriner stood out for his likeability, and his expertise was in demand around the world. It was to Marriner the Vienna Philharmonic turned when it felt it had forgotten how to play Mozart. He also served as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.
As a result of his commitments he was almost perpetually on tour, often spending between 200 to 300 days a year away from home. (One of his many awards was a Queen’s Award for Export.) “The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less,” he observed at the age of 80. “I just wish all these offers had come in when I was 30.”
In April 2014 he led the Academy of St Martin in the Fields with his usual good humour and polish in a concert for his 90th birthday featuring the music of Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Elgar. At the end, Kenneth Sillito, the former leader of the orchestra, said what many in the audience were thinking: “For most 90-year-olds, it would be enough to attend a concert, let alone conduct it.”
Neville Marriner was born in Lincoln on April 15 1924 and was taught violin as a child by his father. From Lincoln School he went on, aged 13, to the Royal College of Music. Later he studied violin under René Benedetti at the Paris Conservatoire.
Called up during the war, he ran motorboat raids into France before D-Day and was invalided out with kidney damage. The man in the next hospital bed was a mathematician and harpsichordist, Thurston Dart, who would become the leader of the earlymusic revival. After the war, he formed a violin-and-harpsichord duet with Dart, and their performances led to the formation of the Jacobean Ensemble, an early-music group that recorded the Purcell trio sonatas in 1950. The pair also performed as the Virtuoso String Trio with Peter Gibbs, a former fighter pilot.
After a year teaching at Eton College, in 1948 Marriner was appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Music and joined the Martin String Quartet as second violin. In around 1950 he began studying conducting with Pierre Monteux at Monteux’s school in Maine. He performed as a violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1952 and in 1956 was appointed principal second violin with the LSO. He continued to perform with them until 1968 and also played with the London Mozart Players.
As a counterpoint to his itinerant life, Marriner devoted much of his time in Britain to designing and building a kind of family hamlet near the village of Chardstock in Devon.
Marriner was appointed CBE in 1979, knighted in 1985 and appointed Companion of Honour in 2015. He was honoured by the Austrian Music Academy with two Gemeinde Awards for his Mozart recordings, and was made an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
In 1949 he married Diana Carbutt. The marriage was dissolved and in 1957 he married, secondly, Elizabeth Sims (Molly), who survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage. His son, Andrew, is a wellknown clarinettist.
Sir Neville Marriner, born April 15 1924, died October 2 2016