Page 169 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

Symphony Orchestra (LSO) during the heyday of Dorati’s Mercury recordings in
London. “The whole team came for a month, in the summer, and we recorded
from morning to evening, Sunday to Saturday, for a month. It was generally
much more interesting than our daily routine, just the ambient hysteria and the
efforts to concentrate in this race against time” (Directory, 1999). Neville
Marriner, who had a much more affable character than the Hungarian’s very
“pressure cooker”, could not be in a better school of efficiency.

By this time Neville Marriner had begun a second activity, establishing the
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in 1958 to give concerts at a church of that
name. At first, Marriner led the Academy from his chair of 1 violin. It was Pierre
er
Monteux (principal conductor of the LSO from 1961 to 1964) who trained him as
director. “Neville, why can’t you stand up and lead normally, like a man?” » the

mustachioed Frenchman asked him in London, before welcoming him to his
master classes in the United States. Marriner kept his two jobs “, remaining with
the LSO until 1969, when he was invited to conduct the newly formed Los
Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

The creation of the Academy to serve the baroque and classical repertoire with
smaller numbers is part of a general European movement of the 1950s: in Italy
with Renato Fasano and the Virtuosi di Roma, then I Musici (without conductor);
in Germany with the orchestras of Karl Ristenpart in the Saarland and Karl
Münchinger in Stuttgart; in France thanks to Jean-François Paillard; in Prague
with Milan Munclinger; and in the USSR when Rudolf Barchaï created the
Moscow Chamber Orchestra.

Marriner’s models in London were the musicologist Thurston Dart, a pioneer in
the rediscovery of early music in Britain, and Boyd Neel, who had established a
chamber orchestra as early as the 1930s. Marriner, injured in the war, had met
Thurston Dart in a field hospital.

Rapid growth

The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields’ first record dates from March 1961, for

L’Oiseau-Lyre. The Marriner saga was later documented by another Decca label,
Argo, and then jointly by Philips. If the association with Philips is the best known,
that with Argo has produced some flagship projects, such as The four Seasons of
Vivaldi, the Sonatas for strings by Rossini and the Requiem by Mozart. In 2014,
Decca brought together the main stages of this journey in a box set of 28
CDs, The Argo Years (ref. 478 6883), unfortunately incomplete and evading a
number of discs devoted to the 20th century repertoire century, notably a
e
formidable Bartók record.