Page 124 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

caricature of a professor of music - he saw me for what I was, a provincial youngster, one of dozens
who applied to the college for admission. I, on the other hand, thought I was a star until my first
day as a student there when I discovered that I was the very junior beginner of my year and a long
way down the line. It was a very character-building experience’.

Marriner entered in 1939 and considers his most important teacher there to have been Albert
Sammons: ’I admired him the most ·although he was not at first my teacher. W.H. Reed, a close
friend and early biographer of Elgar, was my teacher for the first two years. When he died suddenly
in 1942, his successor both as leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and at the RCM was
George Stratton. They were very solidly English-style players who had followed a very orthodox
route. Albert was a great teacher by example. He could show you exactly what to do. He couldn’t
tell you how he did it, but he could show you how it should be done and how it sounded. Willy
Reed was probably more academic and had a more physical attitude toward playing the violin. He
could sense individual differences among students and the modifications that these required.
George Stratton was an immensely practical person. He tended to have a go at everything in a
rather exuberant way and was not too critical of details. He was not, for example, the sort of player
who could ever have made a gramophone record because the warts that came through would be so
outrageous that the music-making could not have overcome them. He had a string quartet that met
“on the day” and tended to play their concerts as they would orchestral dates. They might all play
very beautifully, and with good heart, but perhaps have no conception of what they played.

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‘I don’t believe that in those days at the RCM it was believed that an Englishman could be an
international soloist. Even Sammons, who was Elgar’s preferred interpreter of his Violin Concerto
(even above Kreisler, who never really took to it) and who made pioneering recordings of both it
and the Delius Concerto, never thought about going abroad to play. I remember him telling me
once, “You know, old chap, those Mozart violin concertos, they’re not very good for the public, old
chap. They all have quiet endings. When I’m in the provinces, old chap, I just put in a couple of
chords at the end because the public appreciate the fact that they know it’s over”. He would
actually put in two big G major chords at the end of K216! He also told me about once playing
somewhere in Sheffield, where a man came backstage afterwards to see him. “Mr. Sammons,” he
said, “I really did enjoy that. That was a wonderful concert! If I could drop you a hint, though, I do
think that in that Max Bruch Concerto, there were lots of places where you could have stopped!” I
always felt that Albert’s fingerings for the Elgar were the authentic fingerings, the ones that Elgar
would recognise as the sort of phrasing he would expect. The Three Choirs Festival was common
to both of them: cathedral acoustics, which necessitated rather slow tempos, and produced a sound
utterly without gaps. If you could find a fingering that covered a bow change you would use ir(i.e. if
you used the same finger and the string went on vibrating while you changed the bow and the
finger was still moving, you got a great big swoop on it, of course. But at that time it was con-
sidered the way you played legato. It was a combination of bow and finger. It was only later,
because of Heifetz, that it was discovered that you could play legato with the bow only and could
use whatever fingerings you liked on top of it). As a young man, Menuhin managed to steal all the
glory away from Sammons in this work but I think that Sammons remained the most characteristic
of all the Elgarian violinists, the one who understood the music best’.

The fact that Reed, Stratton and Sammons were all English-born and trained players did not,
Marriner is quick to point out; constitute an ‘English School’ at the RCM. ’No one ever talked of an
English School. Isolde Menges, who studied with Auer, brought some of the qualities of the Russian
school. There was the school of Rowsby Woolf at the RAM. He was the senior instructor there, like