Mozart from ASMF and Marriner

Neville Marriner's records with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields are always a good listen, so here they are with two familiar Mozart masterworks and one piece that is less well known.

These recordings come from 1970 and were made not in St. Martin's, but in St. John's, Smith Square, a historic church that is now a concert hall.

A print of St. John’s, Smith Square from 1814

The reviews were generally favorable. Here's Eric Salzman in Stereo Review: 

[The LP] offers an extraordinary amount of pleasure in the form of a warm and highly poetic version of K. 364 [the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola] - much more satisfactory than some highly touted and illustrious versions - and an elegantly melodic "night music." 

Marriner's favorite melodic phrasing - an arch with a subtle crescendo in the middle and a falling away at the end of the phrase - is heard to particularly good advantage in K. 525 [Eine kleine Nachtmusik]. It gives the music a kind of breathing, sighing, pastoral quality that is just right. 

K. 318 [the Symphony No. 32] is an oddity. It is called a symphony, but it obviously is not. It has a single movement - a big allegro, interrupted by a long andante and has the festive scoring of horns, trumpets, and drums in addition to the more common winds and strings. There are other peculiarities: the ambiguous opening, the unexpected andante in the original key, the truncated reprise, all of which somehow suggest the theater. It makes a nice, although hardly needed, extra. 

Neville Marriner

The Sinfonia Concertante is the masterwork on the program. Richard Wigmore described it as follows in The Gramophone:

The initial entry of the soloists, suspended high above the orchestra’s cadential phrases, is one of the most magical moments in any Mozart concerto; and as several performances reveal, the music’s grandeur, poetry and almost erotic yearning need not preclude a vein of frisky playfulness reminiscent of Mozart’s violin concertos. The Andante is a transfigured love duet triste that touches depths of desolation found elsewhere only in the Andantino of the Jeunehomme Piano Concerto, K271, and the Adagio of the A major Piano Concerto, K488. Mozart’s own cadenza then pushes the music to a new pitch of chromatic pathos. After the bereft, disconsolate close, the contredanse finale, virtually unshadowed by the minor key, bounds in with a glorious sense of physical relief.

Alan Loveday, Stephen Shingles

Shirley Fleming of High Fidelity was disappointed with the recording balance in the Sinfonia Concertante - she thought the soloists (Alan Loveday, violin, Stephen Shingles, viola) were too much in the background, a view I share.

Marriner obviously takes the work's designation to heart and conceives of it as an ensemble piece featuring two prominent instruments. I'm afraid I conceive of the work as a two-solo concerto, and I am therefore frustrated by the fact that the soloists - particularly the violist - often tend to be eclipsed by the orchestra.

Otherwise, the recording is excellent - and the disc should provide much listening pleasure.

LINK

A Classic Account of 'The Four Seasons'

The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields has only appeared here once before even though they have long been a personal favorite.

So today we make amends by featuring an LP that has some seasonal appeal by virtue of its including a famous performance of the "Winter" concerto. This is of course the oft-recorded and much beloved Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi.

The recording comes from the ASMF's early heyday, 1969, just over a decade after the ensemble was founded under the leadership of Neville Marriner (1924-2016), then the principal second violin of the London Symphony.

Neville Marriner

The ASMF took its name from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the 18th century James Gibbs church on Trafalgar Square. Here's what I wrote about the group in my earlier post:

While performance styles in baroque and classical music have moved on from the refined and subtle approach of this modern-instrument ensemble, to me the ASMF will always represent a high point in 20th-century recorded music.

The distinctively named Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields laid claim to being the most widely recorded orchestra in the world for many years. Its records were popular for good reason - under conductor Neville Marriner, they were almost guaranteed to be beautifully played and elegantly presented.

From the beginning, the Academy's repertoire was heavily tilted toward the baroque and classical eras.

Concerning this performance, let's hear from Edward Greenfield of The Gramophone:

There is an element of fantasy in this performance that sets it apart from all direct comparison. I have never before enjoyed Vivaldi so much, but I can imagine some will prefer a severer approach...

Continually one seems to be hearing this scoring for the very first time, and the delicacy of rhythmic pointing (as in the opening movement of "Autumn") is even more striking than one expects from the superb St Martin's ensemble...

In keeping with the whole performance Alan Loveday, the soloist, may use a rich tone, but neither he nor the others could be accused of anything like romantic sentimentality. 

Alan Loveday

One more quote - here is Anne Inglis of The Guardian writing about Alan Loveday (1928-2016) and this performance:

The ASMF’s founder, Neville Marriner, asked Loveday to be the violin soloist in a recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1969); his beautiful, unmannered playing led to sales of half a million copies and the ASMF’s first gold disc. Marriner, a contemporary at the Royal College of Music in London, recalled that Loveday “was better than any of us. I would say that he was the best individual violin player that the RCM has ever produced.”

Simon Preston

Let me also mention another important figure: Simon Preston (1938-2022), the keyboard continuo player on this record. He was a virtuoso organist who was also the choir director at Christ Church, Oxford (as he was when this record was made) and later at Westminster Abbey.

Appropriate to this season (at least around here), listen for the witty harpsichord shivers he contributes to the famed opening of the Allegro movement of the Winter concerto. Just one memorable moment among many in this superb performance by all involved. Vivid recording, as well.

LINK