Page 125 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

Sammons at the RCM, but for different reasons: Rowsby because he was a great pedagogue, Albert
because he was a soloist’.

’Sammons remained the most characteristic of all the Elgarian violinists’

Marriner’s studies at the RCM were interrupted in 1942, when he was called up for the Army.
He returned to the RCM in January 1945. ’As soon as it became possible after the war ended, I
went to the Paris Conservatoire as an external student of Rene Benedetti and I stayed there for
almost a year. I had the feeling that I needed to go abroad in order to get something that I had
missed hitherto. I wanted my playing to have flair, flamboyance, éclat. I also wanted to say that I
had studied at the Paris Conservatoire. In fact, it was merely a different set of disappointments.
Benedetti certainly could teach people to play the violin, but I don’t think that he had any feeling
for music at all and it became a rather routine affair there. I did learn a different set of disciplines. I
soon realised how primitive my aural training had been. The attitude toward the subject at the
RCM was “do as well as you can”. At the Conservatoire it was absolutely necessary to understand
solfege thoroughly in order to talk and work in tonic sol-fa and never mention things like E-natural
ever again. The other discovery I made while in Paris was the tremendous number of talented
young violinists who came there from such places as Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Spain. They did not
come to London, which was not an international teaching centre. Britons, New Zealanders,
Australians and Canadians studied there but Europeans tended to go to Paris, especially at that
time’.

Read our April 2024 feature on violinist Joshua Bell, the current director of the Academy of St
Martin in the Fields, who speaks about the inspiring ethos of the group, as well as celebrations to
mark the centenary of the orchestra’s founder, Neville Marriner.