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.