Best of Marriner

The music world has lost one of its brightest and longest-shining luminaries.

On Oct. 2, Sir Neville Marriner, the violinist and conductor long associated with the chamber orchestra that he founded in 1958, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, died at the age of 92. His passing came three days after he conducted the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto in what would be his final performance.

The concert program was Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 39, 40, and 41. Whether Marriner would’ve chosen those works as his swan song is impossible to say. Having made over 600 recordings, he would’ve had a stultifying amount of material to consider.

Nevertheless, Mozart played a significant role in raising Marriner’s and his academy’s profiles. After all, Marriner supervised (and conducted much of) the music used in Miloš Forman’s 1984 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Mozart-based play Amadeus. The soundtrack, which eventually sold over 6 million copies, became the go-to classical album for a generation raised on MTV and thereby performed a valuable cultural service.

That the soundtrack became Marriner’s best-known album is somewhat ironic. He’d founded the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields to restore baroque music to its original luster, and Mozart, who came of age in the post-baroque years, was classical with a capital C.

More irony: Marriner’s and his academy’s embracing of diverse musical periods came about because they themselves had become so popular by the 1970s that rival baroque ensembles—some led by academy alumni—were cutting in on their baroque-only market share. So, with the encouragement of their record company, they bid their comfort zone adieu.

Shortly after Marriner’s death, the English critic Norman Lebrecht (a good friend of the conductor’s and the proprietor of the hugely informative classical-music website slippedisc.com) published a list of what he called 10 “indispensable” Marriner recordings. Three Mozarts made the cut, with Marriner’s 1975 recording of the Piano Concerto No. 27 featuring the pianist Alfred Brendel coming in at No. 1.

It’s the recordings that Lebrecht listed third, however, Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Sospiri, that in some ways most fully reflect Marriner’s talent and range and that may most accurately foreshadow his reputation’s future permutations.

Elgar was neither a baroque nor a classical composer but a romantic of a distinctly British flavor. His music, partly because of its relative simplicity, has seldom lit fires under critics. Yet its combination of stately vigor and dignified melancholy magnificently expresses the pre–World War I British spirit. And it was in seeking to do justice to Elgar’s wind-swept heights and his plunging depths that Marriner and the academy were at their best.

Actually, they were always at their best: Marriner never settled for less. But there was something in the fin de siècle British repertoire that seemed to focus their rare ability to sound like one unified instrument even more than usual.

Their 1968 recording of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Serenade, Sospiri, Elegy, and Dances from The Spanish Lady is a particular high point, but by the end of the 1970s they’d also done exceptionally well by Elgar’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, and Peter Warlock.

And they weren’t through. In 1995, they accompanied the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber on a thoroughly lovely album that included compositions by Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger, George Dyson, John Ireland, and Cyril Scott.

It was called English Idyll. And if Marriner’s nearly 70-year career had to be summed up by the title of one of his many albums, a more fitting one would be hard to find.