I interviewed him back in 2009 for the magazine of the Musikverein in Vienna, an interview that was translated into German and didn't come out in English at the time, so I hope my lovely editor there will forgive me if I run it now, in a slightly shortened form, by way of tribute.
Interview with Sir Neville Marriner (2009)
In 1958 a young
orchestral violinist in London gathered together a small ensemble of musical friends
to play for fun, with no conductor. Nobody knew that this would be the start of
one of the best-loved orchestras in British musical life: the Academy of St
Martin-in-the-Fields. The violinist’s name was Neville Marriner; and when a
venture into larger repertoire eventually demanded that someone must conduct,
as the leader it had to be him. The rest, as they say, is history.
The orchestra celebrated
its golden jubilee in 2008 with an intense programme of touring. Frequently it
still performs without a conductor – Marriner, now 84, says he is “a sort of
godfather” to it. Yet he and the ensemble have remained virtually synonymous to
their enthusiastic audience, not least thanks to the vast number of recordings
they made during the industry’s heyday, which coincided with the orchestra’s
early years.
 |
| Sir Neville Marriner. Photo: (c) Decca |
...Performing in Vienna carries
a sense of occasion. “It’s the focal point of classical music in Europe,” he
says. “I think it is the ambition of every musician in the world to perform in
the Musikverein. Other places would be the Philharmonie in Berlin, La Scala in
Milan, or Carnegie Hall, but somehow the Musikverein takes precedence – you
want to prove yourself in the heart of the classical music tradition. There
have been so many great performances in there that you’re challenged every time
you step onto the stage.”
It’s quite a distance
to the Musikverein from Marriner’s relatively humble origins in Lincoln, where he grew up in the shadow of
one of the UK’s most beautiful cathedrals. His father was a keen amateur
musician: “He could play the piano and the violin and he conducted the local
choir. Although he was a builder, his life was really about music. I don’t
think I ever went to sleep as a kid without some sort of music going on in the
house.” Aged 13, the young Neville went to London to play to the principal of
the Royal College of Music. “The examination he gave me was absolutely
terrifying! And he had a beard and the Victorian manner to go with it. But I
knew it was a turning point in my life.”
At the RCM, Marriner studied
with two extremely distinguished violinists: Albert Sammons and WH “Billy”
Reed. “On the first day at college, you discover that although you might have
been the brightest spark in your particular area of the country, suddenly
everyone plays better than you do and it’s quite alarming!” Marriner recalls
wryly. “Billy steered me through that, and Albert was very helpful later on.” Reed
was the leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and had been Elgar’s closest
consultant when writing his Violin Concerto. “Billy had the first pages of the
Elgar Violin Concerto – he kept the manuscript because there were so many of
his suggestions in it that he felt he’d virtually written it himself. Certainly
most of the technical passages that Elgar himself couldn’t have achieved were
entirely due to Willy’s advice.”
It was partly an
encounter with another legendary violinist that made Marriner decide to hang up
his violin for good. He spent some years in America studying conducting with
Pierre Monteux, and in 1969 he founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “In
Los Angeles, Jascha Heifetz was one of our neighbours – and after playing in a
string quartet with him, I thought maybe it was time to stop!” He doesn’t miss the
instrument: “It was a sort of albatross around my neck, because if you don’t
work each day you feel guilty. I had lived with that discipline for 30 to 40
years – it was quite a relief to give it up.”
His orchestral experience
proved invaluable when he began to conduct. It’s intriguing that many
conductors begin instead as pianists; but both routes, he suggests, have
advantages and simply produce different styles on the podium. “If you’ve played
in orchestras, it’s useful because you understand them psychologically: you
know how hateful it is to be pushed into doing something that you don’t really
like, and musically speaking you tend to know what the musicians would prefer
you to do. As a pianist, though, you can learn the score at the piano in half
the time it takes when you’re a string player with an instrument that involves
just one line. The pianist-conductors speak more in musical generalities; if
you’re a string player you tend instead to identify particular instruments and
their problems.
“Because I’d been
playing the violin most of my life, I’ve always thought that the physical
gestures I made were much more natural than if I’d been sitting at a piano and
hunching my shoulders. I often remember Solti, who was all shoulders and sometimes
made rather uncomfortable gestures, compared to, for example, Monteux, who was a
violin and viola player and always looked so comfortable as a conductor.”
The Academy began
life, as Marriner puts it, as “refugees from conductors”. At first, it was
simply a group of players who, though excited to work in symphony orchestras,
felt that they wanted “to take more responsibility for expressing their own
musicality”. For the first two years they played informally at Marriner’s house
and had no intention of performing. “We only began because the keyboard player,
Jack Churchill, suggested it.” His Sunday job was playing the organ at St
Martin-in-the-Fields, the famous 18th-century church on the corner
of Trafalgar Square in London. “He said that we could always give a concert
there. We were rather grudging about it, but eventually he persuaded us. Then
someone asked us to make a record – and it all happened. We were stuck with it!”
Much influenced by the
musicologist Thurston Dart, Marriner found himself and the Academy at the
forefront of what would become a revolution in performing style. “Having played
in symphony orchestras for a long time, I used to feel there was something that
we weren’t quite catching,” he explains. “The bulk, the weight of the sound,
couldn’t quite bring off certain qualities that were latent in the music. The
texture was the first thing the Academy aimed for – a transparency, vitality
and virtuosity that you couldn’t achieve with a hefty symphonic sound. That was
our earliest ambition. The great thing about the Academy was that, being a
small group, we were able to discuss these things; sooner or later we achieved
a style that seemed to suit everyone.”
Since then, he adds,
the ‘early music movement’ has become somewhat beset by what he terms
“navel-gazing”. “The extreme types of early music performances I find a little
bit tedious and not necessarily helpful,” he admits. “It’s sad that symphony
orchestras don’t really play Haydn and Mozart any more. They play Beethoven,
but critics turn their noses up, and that’s a loss. But there are some very
good contemporary groups of players who specialise in early music and sort of
early instruments – even if the instruments are reproductions and were made yesterday!”
With 2009 marking the bicentenary
of Haydn’s death, Marriner is glad that everyone will have a chance to reassess
the composer’s work, not least because Haydn is constantly overshadowed these
days by his pupil and friend, Mozart. “Interestingly, Haydn showed much more
mastery of the orchestra in his early years than did Mozart,” Marriner says. “I
always think of Haydn as the precursor of Beethoven: the late Haydn symphonies
and the early Beethoven ones overlap very much stylistically and in their
technical achievements. In many ways he was more important to the tradition of
classical orchestral writing than Mozart.”
Looking ahead,
Marriner insists he has no intention of retiring. “I think I’ll die before I
retire,” he remarks. “I’m planning my diary into 2012. Mostly it’s a sort of
hangover from being young, unsuccessful and terrified to look in the diary and
see nothing. That sensation never seems to go away as you get older.”
As for the orchestra, though
the musical climate in general has never been tougher he is confident that the
Academy will weather the blast. “I’ve always hoped they will keep their
fundamental objectives – a form of stylistic integrity – and because they are
known to have achieved this they will always be desirable,” he says. “The
public seems to stay with them, and I think as long as they insist on keeping
their standards, they’ll survive very well.”
