Sir Neville Marriner

[semloh]

RIP Sir Neville Marriner, who died last night, aged 92. What a marvellous musical legacy this lovely man leaves us. 

[MartinH]

Yes, indeed, a great musician and conductor. Though usually associated with early music, I treasure some of his recordings of Romantic era music: Tchaikovsky's Manfred is terrific. His Vaughan Williams is marvelous, and his Schumann set of complete symphonies sadly underrated. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to hear him live a couple of times, with ASMF and in Minnesota. RIP. I sincerely hope that a nice biography is being assembled. The list of legendary conductors he played with when he was a violinist is astonishing.

[Alan Howe]

A great musician indeed. And a great recorded legacy.

[adriano]

His Capriccio recording of Tchaikovsky's Four Orchestral Suites is the most exciting one, better than Svetlanov's and Dorati's! It's available again on Brilliant Classics.
And there is a stupendous EMI disc with Overtures, Intermezzi and Suites by Wolf-Ferrari. Highly recommendable!
And, of course, I love his Mozart.

[Alan Howe]

I have found almost everything Marriner did to be nothing less than excellent. His Brahms symphonies are vastly underrated - as is his Elgar.

[MartinH]

I really like his Dvorak symphonies 7-9, too. His conducting reminds me of his mentor, Monteux: direct, unfussy, perfectly chosen tempos, clear and transparent sound. Didn't try to remake the music the way he thought it should be composed.

[alberto]

I had the luck to attend at least eight concerts conducted by Marriner.
He commanded a very huge and varied repertoire not also on record. For instance with the Academy he brought Cherubini Anacreon overture and Weber Symphony n.1.With the Torino Radio Orchestra he proposed Enigma Variations, and- the last time he came (2008) - Beethoven short Cantata Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, some Schubert songs for mezzo and orchestra (Reger or Britten transcriptions) and Mendelssohn First Night of Walpurga.

[eschiss1]

He may also have performed and toured with one of Onslow's symphonies, some years back, but I'm not sure... (I was skimming- dorkily- back issues of the Musical Times concert listings, as I would do, in the University music library, when I saw a note on that elsewhere in the issue somewhere, iirc. Not absolutely positive as to the conductor though.)

(Not confusing it with the BBC broadcast of the fourth conducted by Prausnitz in 1985, though I didn't know about that until just now- tangential anyway.)

[chill319]

The Academy's performance of Mendelssohn's Octet in which Marriner plays second violin is still my favorite.

And in the Mozart concertos he recorded with Moravec in the 90s -- and which he undoubtedly had performed umpteen times before -- the orchestral parts sound
well loved but freshly considered.

[eschiss1]

His range taken overall, and including BBC broadcasts, seems to have been wider than I anyway give him credit for- recordings and broadcasts of a fair number of modern works (e.g. by Maw), early 20th-century works (early Webern), on the one hand, alongside works whose presence in his repertoire surprises me less (Rodrigo, Mozart, Handel, Corelli, etc.
His recording of Mozart's C minor mass (the unfinished one, not the early one) is a favorite of mine (and the work itself, I think, should be heard by people who haven't, especially if they still think of Mozart in terms of his earliest, not-very-impressive- or characteristic (and _therefore_, as night the day, overused for pedagogy...) piano sonatas. As though Raff were well-known but we only heard his 6th over and over, or - well, easy to imagine cases. But anyways.)