Mondays with Morgan: Vince Mendoza and Douglas Marriner – Sir Neville Marriner centennial concerts in London, April 15-24

By rosagarland on 8 April 2024 • ( Leave a comment )

The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and composer, arranger and conductor Vince Mendoza, as well as drummer, composer and educator Douglas Marriner.

Both are involved in four special concerts to honour the centenary of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ founder – and Marriner’s grandfather – the legendary conductor and violinist Sir Neville Marriner, which will take place throughout April in London and Lincoln, England. Full listings can be found at the bottom of this article.

Joshua Bell plays the violin and Douglas Marriner sits behind his drum kit on stage, with vairous members of the orchestra playing behind them. — CAMA Santa Barbara: Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields – Joshua Bell (L), Music Director and Violin & Douglas Marriner (R), percussion. Photo credit: Granada Theatre.

After taking soil samples from the beaches of Normandy, Sir Neville Marriner was in a hospital bed suffering from shrapnel wounds, when he met his bunk neighbour, harpsichordist Thurston Dart, an appreciator of the baroque repertoire. Their meeting arguably changed the course of English classical music.

“They’d started talking about music, and they said, ‘Well, maybe we should play sometime,’” relates Marriner’s grandson, Douglas Marriner. As he explains, the London orchestras were severely impacted by the tolls of the war: as per who remained from the war effort, “The standard was not ideal.” Within these frustrated dynamics, Sir Neville took a fresh approach to how he’d make his music.

“My granddad – in the music room upstairs from where I was born – started having some chamber music reading sessions, and they just got together and started playing,” Douglas relates. “It started off very intimately and very small, then started to grow a little bit. And eventually, somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t you put a concert on?’”

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One thing led to another, and Marriner and Dart went on to co-found the chamber orchestra Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, along with John Churchill, then the Master of Music at the London church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Thereby, Marriner would shift the European classical music purview, as you’ll learn below in an interview with Douglas and seven-time Grammy winner Vince Mendoza.

Today, the conductorless Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields is led by violinist and music director Joshua Bell, and they’re about to pay tribute to Marriner via a series of centenary concerts (Marriner was born April 15, 1924). There will also be an exhibition in the St. Martin in the Fields crypt (details below).

LondonJazz News: How would you describe Sir Neville Marriner’s magnitude in the world?

Douglas Marriner: He would have been 100 this April, and it’s a nice round number to use to look back and figure out just what he was able to create in that time. Because when one is alive, it’s quite difficult to confront those sorts of things comfortably, especially for British musicians and British people. It doesn’t come very naturally to us.

So, it’s an opportunity for me, as his grandson, to take stock and find out a little bit more about him, and become more familiar with some of the records that I hadn’t become familiar with previously.

What is really nice to come out is the similar experiences that other musicians seemed to have from working with him. I know him as my grandfather, and I saw how he was with his musicians. That was a wonderful lesson, to be able to see both sides. But it wasn’t really two sides, because he was entirely consistent with how he spoke to everybody.

Vince Mendoza: As an outsider looking into the British classical music scene, I think the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, on a certain level, kind of put Britain on the map, playing 18th and early 19th century [music] and making those types of recordings.

Our focus of attention went from the German and French orchestras playing the early music, over to the scene in London. Those were the recordings that I always went for, as a young music fan and student working with this repertoire. If I wanted to go to a performance of some of this music, the Academy was the first place that I looked.

Douglas Marriner smiles and runs a hand through his hair, sitting at a drum kit outside with a harbour scene in the background. — Douglas Marriner. Photo credit: Meirion Harries.

LJN: For those interested in getting to know Sir Neville’s work, what are some gateway recordings?

DM: Ooh, that’s a tricky question. Well, you can listen to him when he was still playing the violin in the early recording of the Mendelssohn octet. He was actually playing second violin for that, and the person playing first was Hugh Maguire, who was a sensational Dublin-born violinist. That’s a wonderful recording.

That’s one of the examples of Neville when he was still playing, and leading the orchestra from the violin, which is how the orchestra has returned now with Josh [Bell] leading the orchestra from the violin. So, it’s sort of a full circle back to how it started.

I love his Vaughan Williams. There’s a recording where it’s both “The Lark Ascending,” featuring violin soloist Iona Brown, and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Those were very special recordings for me, growing up and understanding what it means to be British and how we emotionally regulate ourselves.

There’s music which is deeply emotional, and yet there’s a stiff upper lip kind of thing, a line which goes through it all. There’s something very stoic about engaging with music, which is so activating of the waterworks, and yet it requires such strength and duty of care in order to perform it without emotion so other people can revel in it. Really, there’s something very generous about that, giving an understanding that what you’re creating is much larger than the sum of its parts.

One of the things I particularly admired about his style was that it was the opposite of flamboyant. It drew the attention span all the way down to the tiniest little movements; there was no posturing. It was an acknowledgement that the music’s already there.

VM: Well, for those in your audience who don’t want to dig through the hundreds of recordings that you can find from their repertoire, just on Spotify alone – just go to the 1984 soundtrack to Amadeus.

LJN: Wow, of course. That movie looms large in my family.

VM: Just start there and work your way into the repertoire, and how it was refreshed and introduced to a new generation of music listeners.

DM: It really did introduce classical music to more fresh ears than probably anything else has.

What was interesting to me was to hear how the movie came about. He was approached about the filming of what had already been a play on the West End. His terms were that they record the music first, and then the film was shot to the music. It’s not the other way around. They weren’t going to do Hollywood edits or cuts, they weren’t going to mess around with Mozart’s music. The music was good enough to live on its own.

Vince Mendoza smiles in a studio, standing behind a desk as he turns the page of a music score. — Vince Mendoza. Photo credit: Pamela Fong.

LJN: Douglas, how will your jazz drumming fit into this classical program?

DM: It’s a funny one, because it’s not necessarily a strictly jazz drum part. Part of it is using brushes and mallets in a way that you would hear in certain jazz performances. But there’s no swing; it’s not like there are patterns superimposed on this music. It unfolds from the contour, on the line of this musical journey that Vince has conjured up for us.

It’s always slightly a no-man’s land for an improvising jazz drummer to find that balancing point between written cues and certain ideas which are on the part, and something which is still quite nebulous, actually. Certainly, some error is involved in trying to sculpt what will eventually be the first interpretation of the piece, and there’s always the pressure to try and get it right the first time.

When you have a piece which is so multifaceted, I think it’s foolish to believe that everything’s going to be absolutely set in stone by day one, because it’s a piece that will unfold over time, and it will possibly sound rather different.

LJN: Can we talk about the exhibition in the St. Martin in the Fields crypt?

DM: I don’t quite know exactly what’s going to be there yet. But I assume there will be quite a lot of photographic evidence of the orchestra’s history, and of some of the key members who made that orchestra. Hopefully there’ll be lots of references to the music itself, and the recordings that catapulted the Academy, and London music-making, to the wider world.

The best way to remember him is to listen to the music, and keep sharing those recordings, and make sure that young people are able to be held by the hand, and have people explain why the treasure in this music is worth excavating.

I teach music over here in New York, and one thing I continually explain is: this might not be particularly interesting right now. But if you just store it in the filing system, eventually, in 20 years time, you might go through something where you actually need this, and this might profoundly help you.

VM: I don’t think that there’s ever been a piece of information or music that I found to be unusable in my entire life.

Everything I’ve ever heard has become a part of my consciousness of music: how I play it, and what I want to hear. All of that is part of my experience of playing and writing. So, I think that’s good advice to your students, that everything they hear is going to be useful.

LISTINGS

Celebrating Sir Neville Marriner

St Martin-in-the-Fields, 15 April 2024

Jaime Martin conductor

Joshua Bell director*

Tomo Keller director

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

PROGRAMME:

Handel Concerto Grosso in B Flat, Op.3, No. 2

Mozart Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Errollyn Wallen World Premiere