Sir Neville Marriner, our patron, as founding Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields is the most-recorded living classical musician; as Pelé is to world football, Marriner is to modern chamber orchestral music.
Under Marriner, the ASMF ‘produced a lean, taut, unsentimental sound, music played at the nimble pace of its epoch rather than with the accumulated weight of awe and reverence.’ Decca Music Group
He was Principal Conductor of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from 1969-1979, then Music Director of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart and guest conductor of such elite ensembles as the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam.
Today he is a much-sought-after conductor in Europe and the US. Marriner’s legacy is a panoply of chamber music which is universally
accessible and has set the bar for performance standards of classical recordings for the past 50 years.
I look forward to working with William Hennessy and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra at the Melbourne Recital Centre.
An orchestra comprising the finest chamber music players was the cornerstone of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 1959.
I am delighted that the same principles have been influential in the ongoing development of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.
