This month marks 100 years since the birth of Sir Neville Marriner, legendary founder and director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Michael White speaks to those who knew him best
The New Yorker magazine once ran a cartoon featuring two parrots whose vocabulary has been pilfered from the radio. One says, ‘That was the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’; the other adds, ‘conducted by Sir Neville Marriner’. And that the joke worked in a publication with a general, worldwide readership was telling.
Throughout more than half a century, the Academy and Marriner were joined umbilically into an uber-brand, commanding instant recognition in the universe of music. Together they toured the world, endlessly. Together they made more recordings than any other conductor/ensemble partnership in history, their only serious rival being Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. And although he eventually passed the Academy’s artistic direction over to Joshua Bell, Marriner remained closely involved as Life President until life left him in 2016 – continuing, as his son Andrew understatedly puts it, to be ‘mentioned in dispatches’ whenever the ensemble gets a name-check.
The dispatches will be in overdrive this month as Marriner’s centenary celebrations kick in. And at the heart of them will be a series of concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Wigmore Hall, the Festival Hall and Lincoln Cathedral, flagging the city where Marriner was born on 15 April 1924 into a modest but musical family.
His father, a carpenter, was also the organist at the local Methodist chapel, which meant that the young Neville was raised in a culture of robust hymnody and annual Messiahs before leaving to study violin at the Royal College of Music. Thereafter he freelanced in post-war London: playing with chamber ensembles, rising through the ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra to lead the second violins. And that’s where he was in his life when a young woman called Molly – later to be Lady Marriner – walked through the door of the apparently ramshackle house in Brook Green he was sharing with others in the music business – one of them writer John Amis.
Now in her happily vigorous mid-90s and living in deepest Dorset, Molly Marriner recalls going to visit Amis at that house ‘which was called Divorce Corner because almost everyone was going through matrimonial traumas, Neville included. And we met on terms that weren’t exactly a
