For eternity, the English conductor Neville Marriner will be the musician associated with the film Amadeus by Milos Forman, released on screens forty years ago. Mozart occupies an important part of the career of this prolific musician, who died in 2016 and who would have been 100 years old on April 15. For the occasion, Warner brings together all his recordings, while Decca publishes a complete Beethoven never before compiled as such.
Publishing “all of Neville Marriner” is impossible, because the conductor, born April 15, 1924 in Lincoln, England, will have zealously accompanied on a number of labels two of the great changes in musical recording: the stereo LP and the period the most spectacular on the compact disc.
Experience
Neville Marriner is, among conductors, undoubtedly one of the record holders of the recording. We place him on a par with Herbert von Karajan. But Antal Dorati was known to have recorded more than Karajan and we must not forget Eugene Ormandy. With Marriner, Dorati, Ormandy and Karajan, we undoubtedly have the leading quartet.
As we have already mentioned in The duty, Neville Marriner is part of Antal Dorati’s discographic saga. Marriner was lead second violinist of the London 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 1er violin. It was Pierre 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 repertoiree century, notably a formidable Bartók record.
These choices resulted from the fact that the image of the conductor remained indisputably linked to the baroque and classical repertoires. For the present centenary, Eloquence Australia, which published in 2022, with the original sleeves, a limited edition box set of Haydn’s symphonies, brings together, in 19 CDs, the Handel recordings from Decca. No novelties, rarities or originality (Messiah, Gross concertos and various known works), but a thematic compilation such as it had not yet been produced.
Decca international has a more unexpected box set: a complete Beethoven. It had never been collected as such, but was indeed available from two sources: Symphonies nbone 1 And 2Then 4recorded in the first half of the 1970s, in LP, and digital recordings of the other symphonies dating from the end of the 1980s. The whole is supplemented by the excellent disc of the dances and contradances and by two versions of the Violin Concertoone with Iona Brown (Argo), the other with Gidon Kremer (Philips), both from 1980.
Two major lessons. First, the symphonies show that the image of Marriner as a good craftsman to whom one did not go for things supposedly so serious is a regrettable condescending posture. Marriner took great care in these recordings. The versions with moderate numbers on modern instruments, if they had been considered and published in this way in a box set, it would have been well above Tilson Thomas, a very interesting proposition, certainly eclipsed by Harnoncourt (Teldec).
Contrary lesson: there is indeed “utilitarian Marriner”, where the leader handles current affairs. Iona Brown is very ordinary in the Violin Concerto by Beethoven and the conductor is disinvested from the introduction. Eleven months later, it is an unrecognizable Marriner who accompanies Gidon Kremer: the soloist is fascinating, the stakes are high (he is one of the first 61 recorded digitally) and the direction, fascinating!
Unexpected legacy
To see that Marriner is one of the most recorded conductors, one need only look at his EMI legacy. While the leader is associated with Philips, Decca and Argo, what are some of his EMI recordings that you could cite? We strictly remember a few Mozarts after the complete Philips symphony. Now Warner brings everything together in a box, and it includes, in all, 80 CDs!
So we remember, little by little, Marriner, more or less abandoned by Philips in favor of Gardiner and his old instruments, becoming the only one, or almost, who could still record Bach, Haydn and Mozart – for EMI – with a chamber orchestra on modern instruments. Some of these CDs, like Haydn’s Grandes Masses and the Mozart series from the 1980s (great symphonies and concertos with Christian Zacharias), which we rarely listened to (Gardiner and others oblige), deserve more than a tender re-listening ( magnificent dosage of winds) and are a balm to the heart.
Marriner had understood, from 1970, the benefit of being available for multiple labels and to make a name for himself as an exquisite accompanist. In his first EMI recording, he accompanied Josef Suk in the romances of Beethoven and rondos of Mozart and Schubert. In his second album, Britten with Heather Harper and Robert Tear the same year, he grasped the challenge of not being labeled a “baroque conductor”. Everything is built from the start. Warner collecting the EMI and Erato catalogs, we find him accompanying the English trumpeter John Wilbraham in 1973 (EMI) and Maurice André in 1974 (Erato).
Some creations fill holes in a catalog (Te Deum of Charpentier) without bringing anything, some remakes are useless (Brandenburg, Messiah in German), many records feature soloists, such as Elly Ameling and Janet Baker in Bach, Kathleen Battle in Händel or Barbara Hendricks in Mozart. And there are these other projects, the overtures of Suppé or Rossini, the symphony of Bizet, Pulcinella and a few rarities (Tippett, Walton, Copland, Bloch, Wolf-Ferrari) which pleased the conductor and showed the range and curiosity of a skillful and warm musician who certainly did not deserve the label of “routine” attached by people who didn’t listen to him.