Icon: Neville Marriner
Edward Breen reflects on the legacy of a pioneering English conductor whose first-hand experience as an orchestral string player proved to be one of his greatest assets on the podium. There are musicians who very obviously change the way we hear music, and those who are so subtly convincing that we barely notice any change has taken place at all. For me, Sir Neville Marriner (1924-2016) belonged emphatically to the latter category. By the end of the 20th century his recordings seemed so natural and so unfailingly stylish that it became easy to overlook how revolutionary they had once sounded, and how many new generations of listeners had encountered Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi through him and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF), causing them to equate Baroque and early Classical music with the clarity, elegance and rhythmic vitality that he pioneered. Marriner's career is often summarised by way of astonishing facts: he made more than six hundred who was already displaying t...
