‘You watch that young man, he’ll be famous one day,’ observed Nora Byron as a young violin teacher hurried down Eton High Street one morning in 1948. The violinist’s name was Neville Marriner, and Miss Byron – a direct descendant of the poet – was well placed to judge. Debussy had eavesdropped on her piano-playing in Paris before the First World War. Now, 40 years on, she could be found joining the queen and her two daughters for the Tuesday evening madrigal sessions at Windsor Castle – the English madrigal being another of her specialities.

None of this would have been lost on the 24-year-old Marriner. A wartime friendship with mathematician turned musicologist Thurston ‘Bob’ Dart had ensured that this greatly gifted violinist was as much at home playing Jacobean consort music as he was playing or directing music by Byron’s erstwhile admirer Debussy.

Marriner is best known as founder-conductor of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF), the world’s first internationally renowned chamber orchestra. We can all assemble lists of distinguished English conductors, yet there’s a sense in which Marriner outstrips them all, both in the longevity of his association with the orchestra he founded (more than 50 years) and in the number of recordings he and his orchestra sold worldwide. Only Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic sold more, and for a similar reason. In this market, quality sells.

Working with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Paris, 1988 (Alamy)

A possible factor in Marriner’s below-the-radar status in the roll call of ‘great conductors’ may be that he learnt his trade not on the podium or in the opera pit, but from within the orchestra, as a rank-and-file violinist who made his name conducting musicians he knew and respected. ‘One of Neville’s many talents was an admirable gift for creating an atmosphere in which music can be enjoyed,’ recalled his friend the cellist Alexander ‘Bobby’ Kok in his immensely readable 2002 memoir A Voice in the Dark: The Philharmonia Years. Amusing, subversive and quick-witted, Marriner did indeed have the ability to help make tolerable the galley-slave conditions in which most musicians work.

Nor was he just a musician. As John Amis explained in a typically rambunctious obituary, he was ‘a good driver, a handyman [a skilled carpenter, in fact], nifty at tennis [albeit keener on cricket], always lucky and good at cards’. Turn to Richard Morrison’s history of the LSO, whose second violins Marriner led during the orchestra’s renaissance years between 1954 and 1967, and you’ll find phrases such as ‘always the sharpest tool in the box’ or ‘ambitious and mercurially clever’.

Born in Lincoln, the son of a carpenter who loved music but lacked the necessary executive skills, Marriner was 15 when he won a scholarship in 1939 to London’s Royal College of Music, where his violin teachers included famous Elgar associates Albert Sammons and WH ‘Billy’ Reed. Having survived the Blitz, he was wounded while carrying out surveillance ahead of the D-Day landings – the lucky chance that led him to recuperating in the same rest home as Dart.

At the war’s end, Dart used his ex-serviceman’s gratuity to study with the great Belgian musicologist Charles van den Borren. Marriner, meanwhile, went to Paris to study with violinist René Benedetti (teacher of Christian Ferras and that other chamber-orchestra whizz Emmanuel Krivine). It was in Paris, where a decent meal cost the same as a packet of tea in bombed-out London, that Marriner first honed his credentials as a bon vivant.

Marriner sometimes led the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the violin (c1983) (Marion Kalter/Bridgeman Images)

We can learn much about Marriner’s personality and career from the very first interview in a vast yet absorbing recent book edited by Raymond Holden, Speaking Musically: Great Artists in Conversation at the Royal Academy of Music (Whitefox Publishing, 1/24). Indeed, we’re doubly lucky, since we also have a hugely enjoyable 35-minute conversation – in the form of an ASMF podcast – about the orchestra’s origins between Lady Molly Marriner, happily still with us, and Sir David Attenborough, a music-loving family friend of more than 60 years’ standing.

The ASMF began in the late 1950s as a small group of mainly LSO musicians meeting in the Marriners’ drawing room to play chamber music ‘as an escape from conductors’. There’s no indication that Marriner planned to become a conductor himself, yet he’d enjoyed an exemplary training in the profession at a time when all the world’s great conductors came to London to record or give concerts. (They included Arturo Toscanini, whose magnetism Marriner admired more than his Brahms.)

As a student in the early war years, Marriner was frequently drafted into the post-Sir Thomas Beecham LPO or the LSO under Sir Henry Wood. ‘Concerts were often both hilarious and embarrassing,’ he told Holden. ‘One had to have a fairly hardy temperament to live through those years as an orchestral player. It wasn’t until Herbert von Karajan took charge of the Philharmonia Orchestra that things got better.’ What most impressed Marriner about Karajan, apart from his extraordinary ear and his ability to rehearse without a score, was the fact that he knew how to control an orchestra. It was almost as revealing an experience as that afforded by Leopold Stokowski’s arrival at the LSO in the late 1950s when the orchestra, in Marriner’s words, ‘suddenly realised that it was a good orchestra’. Other conductors made different impacts: Josef Krips, from whom Marriner learnt the Viennese way with Mozart, or Pierre Monteux, who personally instructed him in the art of podium conducting. There was also the LSO’s famously ferocious manager Ernest ‘flick-man’ Fleischmann – the sobriquet, needless to say, a Marriner invention.

While teaching at Eton, Marriner had played with the Boyd Neel chamber orchestra; co-founded the Virtuoso String Trio with Kok and viola player Stephen Shingles, another ASMF legend; and joined David Martin’s Martin String Quartet. (‘We so enjoyed your concert, Mr String,’ purred one Eton mother.) It was through this chamber playing, Marriner recalled, that his style was set: in particular, his preoccupation with transparency and accuracy of sound.

Marriner at the piano – which he first learnt with his father – c1990 (United Archives GmbH)

One of Dart’s great complaints was the sloppiness of English string playing. It explains why neither he nor Marriner bought into the idea of using ‘period’ strings. Neither could tolerate the inordinate amount of time they took to make a half-decent recording or the poor intonation to which gut strings were prone.

Elsewhere, Marriner was scrupulous in his use of scholarship. Until Dart’s untimely death in 1971, aged 49, it was a collaborative effort, as Marriner explained in a characteristically well-written obituary of Dart for the September 1971 Gramophone. ‘Bob was to research for the umpteenth time existing manuscripts and earliest publications, I was to edit them into performing editions; we would review them together in their printed form, perhaps rehearse dubious conclusions with the orchestra, and then go to the studios. A matter of some six months per magnum opus.’

After Dart’s death, Marriner’s friend Christopher Hogwood edited the text of the first (1743) London performance of Handel’s Messiah for a famous (and, in places, famously swift) 1976 recording. ‘Quite simply, one of the finest accounts of Messiah ever recorded’, wrote Handel collector Teri Noel Towe in Alan Blyth’s 1991 Choral Music on Record. Likewise, Marriner’s 1980 recording of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung would be judged hors concours by Peter Branscombe in that same volume. Neither recording would get into many shortlists today, such is the widespread prejudice against recordings that don’t use period instruments. It’s the same with Marriner’s 1970 Argo recording of Bach’s four Orchestral Suites, which he cited as a fine example of Dart’s ‘technical resourcefulness in the purely practical business of making records’. It’s also the case with Marriner’s 1980 remake of the Brandenburg Concertos (his 1971 edition with Dart had caused a terrific hoo-ha), which – alongside Karajan’s own similarly paced 1978-79 remake using one-to-a-part front-desk players from the Berlin Philharmonic – quickly became the go-to choice for Brandenburg lovers who disliked period strings.

Marriner was no stranger to recording. Indeed, as Decca’s Chris Hazell has recounted, he was the canniest of operators in the studio. The ASMF’s first recording was made in March 1961 for L’Oiseau-Lyre, the label owned by an old patron of Dart and Marriner, the formidable Louise Hanson-Dyer. Another Marriner gift was programme-building. Hence this judiciously assembled debut LP which mixed plausible rarities (a concerto by the German-born ‘Albicastro’, not his real name) with more familiar masterworks such as Handel’s Concerto grosso in G minor, Op 6 No 6. Gramophone’s Denis Stevens, himself a former Philharmonia violinist and by the early 1960s a distinguished US-based musicologist, described it as an hour of music played with ‘precision, care, consummate musicianship, and with more sense of style than all the chamber orchestras in Europe put together’. Walter Legge had said he wanted his Philharmonia Orchestra to play not with ‘a style’, but with style itself. Marriner concurred.

Central to the ASMF’s post-Baroque repertory were all the obvious masterpieces for string orchestra. Roger Fiske thought their 1967 recording of Mendelssohn’s Octet possessed a knife-edge tautness that made a well-favoured version by I Musici seem decidedly tame. That was without conductor. Not so some memorable accounts of classic pieces by Dvořák, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg (their Verklärte Nacht one of the ASMF’s and Marriner’s greatest recordings), Richard Strauss, Bartók (the last composer, claimed Marriner, who really knew how to write for strings) and Stravinsky. I’ve never quite got on with their much-admired recording of Strauss’s Metamorphosen. But their 1967 disc of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, coupled with a sublime account of Apollon musagète, is one I’ve returned to almost more than any other.

Marriner was initially cautious about the symphonies (other than Mozart’s) that he recorded. This despite the fact that his 1973 LP of Bizet’s youthful Symphony in C was a real winner, more exhilarating even than Beecham’s. After Argo was absorbed by Decca, and Decca by PolyGram/Philips, there were bigger undertakings overseen by another distinguished scholar-producer, Erik Smith. There’s a particularly fine Schubert cycle that doesn’t fall at the final two fences as many chamber orchestra Schubert cycles do; and a set of 33 ‘named’ Haydn symphonies that came as a useful complement to the complete Antal Dorati cycle, much of which was recorded on the hoof. Needless to say, Marriner had no wish to join the Bruckner-Mahler rat race. He’d never taken Mahler symphonies seriously, even though he’d always enjoyed playing them. There is, however, a record of Elgar’s First Symphony and In the South, which was one of his own favourites.

Unsurprisingly, it was a pair of films that brought Marriner and the ASMF their widest exposure. The first was Peter Hall’s Akenfield (1974) based on Ronald Blythe’s celebrated portrait of an English village, for which Marriner’s recording of Tippett’s Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli was used. It was only through the genius of this rightly revered Argo recording that so technically difficult a work was finally recognised as one of the towering masterpieces of English music. Years later, as Hall lay dying, he had the recording playing on a tape loop at his bedside.

The second film was Amadeus (1984). Once again, it was blessed with a musically minded director, Miloš Forman, who – most unusually – recorded the music first and shot the film around it. The spin-off discs sold more than 6.5 million copies, bringing Marriner’s favourite composer to a new global audience in performances that were the genuine article.

Mozart operas soon followed, meticulously produced by Erik Smith. Marriner had mostly avoided opera houses and the new breed of self-aggrandising stage directors who took most of the rehearsal time, but he was no slouch where opera itself was concerned. His debut recording was Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (Philips, 6/83), which I suggested was one of the most stylish and engaging of all recorded accounts of the work. His recording of the complete Rossini overtures, all 26 of them, each according to a new critical edition, had already been an important addition to the Rossini discography.

For 18 years (1968-86), Marriner worked a good deal in America, first as music director of the newly founded Los Angeles CO, later as director of the Minnesota Orchestra. The latter was something of a poisoned chalice, such is the hold the trade unions have over most US orchestras. It also explains why this famously prolific conductor made relatively few recordings with either orchestra. He did devise a delightful programme to mark the 1976 US Bicentennial (Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Ives’s folksy Third Symphony, Copland’s Quiet City, Cowell’s Hymn and Fuguing Tune No 10 and Creston’s typically irreverent divertissement A Rumor), but it was recorded in London.

One of Marriner’s last recordings was of Mozart two-piano concertos in 2015 with the Dutch-born Jussen brothers, Lucas (then 22) and Arthur (18). For all that they were favoured pupils of Maria João Pires and Menahem Pressler, it must have been a red-letter day in their young lives to find themselves working with Sir Neville, a great Mozartian, still in fine fettle at the age of 91. The performance of the E flat Concerto, K365, is particularly treasurable.

That same year, Marriner was made a Companion of Honour, and the ASMF became the first (and so far, only) British orchestra to be given the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement. And rightly so, given their massive record sales and the fact that more and more of their concerts were being given abroad.

Sadly, that golden age of British music-making and recording that had extended from 1945 to the mid-1990s was long gone. Gone but, thanks to these recordings, not forgotten. In marking the 100th anniversary of Marriner’s birth, we celebrate both that and the similarly stellar achievements of his many colleagues, collaborators, family members and friends who helped make that golden age.

This interview originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today