Page 114 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

Radio-Symphony Orchestra, a reading of style and dramatic impact carried by high-flying singers:
Lucia Popp, Brigitte Fassbaender, Robert Gambill, Robert Holl. We willingly forget a Charpentier
album with a Te Deum and a Magnificat that is certainly glorious, accompanied by great singers
(Dawn Upshaw, Ann Murray, Ethna Robinson, John Aler, Kurt Moll).

• Haydn and Mozart

The qualitative heart of this box set lies in the recordings of the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is here
that the chef's approach becomes particularly gripping without ever having aged the slightest. A
quartet and orchestral musician, Neville Marriner gave importance to mutual listening and breathing,
which is combined here with an incisive, light, energetic approach but never brutal or rushed. In the
end, Haydn's and Mozart's engravings, we come to think that this is exactly how we should do it: to
invigorate but without brutalizing and lightening but without drying out. The movements of the
masses, concertos and symphonies unfold in just the right tempi whose pace allows the music to
breathe, with the required tone. From this classical corpus, we place at the top
Haydn's Masses recorded with the German choir of the MDR radio station and the Staatskapelle in
Dresden. The fruity timbres of the Saxon phalanx and the discipline of the German choir take these
scores to the heights, sublimated by the alternating direction of a meticulous architect who combines
content and form. Other wonders: the wide selection of Mozart symphonies from No. 24 to No. 41.
These scores were the very heart of the conductor's repertoire with his academicians, and these
superbly recorded engravings
from the 1980s and 1990s are
lessons in style and musicality:
a perfect balance that seduces
the mind while sparing the
senses. the young Anne-Sophie
Mutter is on the violin, Barry
Tuckwell and David Pyat
compete in virtuosity on the
horn. As for the vocal soloists,
we find the young Amanda
Roocroft for a masterful recital
(which adds Cimarosa and
Haydn to Mozart) and the
overly sophisticated Barbara
Hendrix in sacred arias.
Whatever the soloist or the
instrument, the conductor
manages to impose an ideal
setting that accompanies and
supports all these personalities.
Even minor works such as Les
Petits riens are served with this
characteristic care.

• The devoted twentieth
century