Page 208 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

With the self-selecting Academy of St Martin in the Fields, a bunch of musicians disgruntled
with the other London orchestras, Marriner practised democracy in action and achieved a neat
compromise between big-band bluster and period-instrument theories that pervaded the sector
from the 1950s. Listen to his account of the Eroica and you will find a refreshing lack of
dogmatic leadership, the meaning of the music emerging organically from the logic of the
notes. The fourth symphony is, in my view, unsurpassed on record for its lyrical sway. A lack
of bombast in the fifth is positively refreshing. The seventh dances like an old-fashioned
ballroom in a nondescript town. If you want maestro razzle, look elsewhere. This is a
Beethoven set to have close to hand, the one to show friends how a tricky phrase should
ideally go.

If that is not enough to trigger your purchasing finger, the box contains two accounts of the
violin concerto, one by Marriner’s close associate and concertmaster Iona Brown and the
other by the young Gidon Kremer, who plays the outrageously collaged cadenza by the
Soviet dissident Alfred Schnittke – so outrageous that I think this is its first appearance on
CD. You will need all ten fingers to count off the sheaf of great concertos that Schnittke
references. This Beethoven gift set is not for Christmas. It is for life.