The accidental conductor

The Arts:At 83, Neville Marriner is in huge demand, but still finds time for the chamber orchestra he founded in the 1950s, he tells Michael Dervan.

Search for Neville Marriner on Amazon and you'll get a fairly predictable string of hits. There's Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel (in the DVD of the 250th anniversary performance of Messiahfrom the Point in Dublin), Bach and a compilation for his 80th birthday, which he celebrated in 2004. But his true reach is far, far wider than that.

He is, of course, still most closely associated in the public mind with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, which he founded in the late 1950s, and began life as a chamber orchestra playing baroque music. Their joint discography is extensive, and an Amazon search for the two words "Marriner" and "Academy" still yields more than 500 hits. But he's also served at the helm of symphony orchestras in the US (the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis) and Germany (the South German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart), and also, at various times, had a busy career as a chamber musician, an orchestral violinist, and a conductor of opera.

Seated in his comfortable south London living room, he's an avuncular presence. His opinions are clear and strong, and he still enjoys life, conveying a sense almost of bemusement that people continue to show an interest in hiring him to conduct. That bemusement may well stem from the fact that he never actually set out to be a conductor. His early focus was all on the violin playing, and the story of his career, as he tells it, is one of happy accidents.

The world he works in now is very different from the world he knew in his youth. "I grew up in a provincial town, Lincoln, and all the music there was amateur. There was no professional music whatsoever. The first time I ever came into contact with any professional music-making was when I won a prize at the Lincoln Festival, and part of the prize was an audition at the Royal College of Music. I came up to London, and Hugh Allen, who was the director then, said, you have a few choices, you can go into a choir to improve your musical education, or you can go back to school and finish your education before coming back here." He was 16 when he returned to London. "And I was absolutely horrified, because everyone was better than I was. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the talent which was around me. It was terrifying for the first few years. That was in 1939."

His first professional engagement came during the war, "when most of the members of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) were also members of the RAF Symphony Orchestra. When they were called away to various functions, they raided the Royal College for students to fill the gaps. I remember doing Promenade concerts with Henry Wood, where you only had one three-hour rehearsal, and the programme itself lasted about four hours! I was slightly shocked by the standard of performance as it was then."

HIS EARLY ORCHESTRALwork was on a part-time basis. "Most of the players in the orchestras had jobs in cafes and cinemas and theatres during the week, and just gave concerts at the weekend. The standard of orchestral playing was pretty miserable then." He points to record producer Walter Legge's post-war founding of the Philharmonia, as a recording orchestra for EMI, as the turning point.

When Marriner eventually joined the LSO as a player in the mid-1950s, the conductor of the day was Josef Krips, who, he says, showed "that symphony orchestras could play classical music with some style. Normally, you played classical music because it was easy, and didn't need much rehearsal. Until Joe came. He really sorted things out.

"That gave me my first impression that conducting really did have some influence on music-making."

On the side, of course, he worked with the likes of Karajan, Toscanini and Furtwängler. Toscanini was "83 and pretty blind, and his hearing wasn't too wonderful. But just the fact of his personality was quite astounding. Even the most mature and experienced musicians were terrified. Karajan was much more workmanlike. He rehearsed things that orchestras were not used to rehearsing, for intonation and quality of sound. Normally speaking, ensemble had been enough. Karajan went into much more detail.

"Furtwängler," - he laughs - "I just remember, was making a record, and Walter Legge asked him if he wouldn't mind doing it a bit faster so that it would fit on a 78rpm side, when four minutes was the limit. He was slightly pedestrian."

The moment that Marriner himself became interested in conducting was when Pierre Monteux became conductor of the LSO in 1961. "By this time, not having been entirely in love with orchestral playing, we'd started the Academy, in this room here, and we'd just been playing together for fun. We'd been persuaded to give some concerts at St Martins in the Fields, and Monteux came to one of these concerts, and he said, Neville, why don't you conduct properly, instead of just waving your bow?"

The invitation was irresistible. Marriner followed Monteux to his conducting course in Maine, and the die was cast.

In the telling of all of this, Marriner has skipped over his string quartet playing, his membership of the Jacobean Ensemble, a cutting-edge early music group in the 1950s, with Thurston (Bob) Dart, a mathematician and musicologist, as its keyboard player - "the most amiable early music authority I've ever had", in Marriner's words. The exploration of baroque repertoire with the Academy had not come out of the blue. Nor did the skills he acquired when it came to making recordings.

The years with the LSO included lots of activity in the recording studio. They were golden years for London as a centre for classical recordings. "Whole months in the summer were devoted to making records. When Antal Dorati used to come over, it was 10 to 1, 2 to 5, 6 to 9, seven days a week, for a month. It was just like turning a handle. We were just making records all the time.

"I learnt a lot about making gramophone records from those experiences.

Your intention is to give a concert performance every time you make a record. If you sit down and try to make a performance purely for the recording, it's usually pretty dull. Keeping the vitality and the imagination in the performance is the key to making decent records."

Incredible as it may seem, the Academy was started as a kind of relief to the daily grind of symphony concerts and recordings. The routine "wasn't fulfilling enough for quite a few of us. You feel as one of a hundred players that your contribution is not important enough to influence the end product. There is an amount of frustration which grew up. We really started this group because we wanted to have something to say ourselves about the way we played the music.

"During those two years [ before playing in public] we developed a style of interpreting music, which - strangely enough, I was working with the Academy this morning - has stuck by osmosis. This is now 50 years ago, and all the players are quite, quite different, but, stylistically, I can still recognise some of the things we talked about all those years ago, about the vitality in sound, the texture, the always looking for a transparent sound so that you could, as it were, see the trees."

IT WAS AFTERthe third concert that the invitation came, from Louise Dyer of the L'Oiseau Lyre label, to make some records. The rest, as they say, is history. The records were well reviewed, worked as calling cards, and the invitations to perform flowed in. And, in no time at all, more and more labels wanted recordings: Argo, Decca, EMI, Philips. "It was just one of those very fortunate things. And of course when CDs started, we had to start doing it all over again.

"I think the Academy had an individual character. It had very loyal players. And I must say that, as the director of a group like that, I felt that all I was doing was exploiting a lot of very good musicians. It was on their backs entirely that my reputation was made. They were all great players and they all had a lot to say."

As Marriner describes it, the move from chamber orchestras to symphony orchestra was simply another accident waiting to happen. "I was invited to start the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. There, after four or five years, we had great success, and I suddenly started getting invitations from Pittsburgh and Boston and places like that, saying, would you come and conduct a Mozart or a Haydn or a Bach weekend? "I know perfectly well now that it was just that the music director couldn't be bothered doing a weekend of that. But I got invitations from all the great orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony. And then, after a couple of years, I said, yes, of course I'll come, but I also want to do some of my own programmes, and began insisting on symphonic repertoire."

The 83-year-old Marriner, naturally enough, regards the formation of the Academy as his greatest achievement, and also takes enormous pleasure in the fact that his career eventually extended to the conducting of opera.

Has he any regrets? "I regret that I wasn't a better keyboard player, that I couldn't really study scores at the piano. Because it's much quicker. It would have saved many hours from working them out, just by sitting and looking at them, particularly if you want to have any particular colours or style, it's hard to decide until the first rehearsal. And I just wish, maybe, that I'd started conducting earlier. I was about 40 when I started. Apart from that I don't really have any regrets. Is that bad?"

• Neville Marriner conducts the Orchestra of St Cecilia in Beethoven's Pastoral and the Seventh Symphonies at the National Concert Hall (01-4170000) on Monday, and in symphonies by Haydn (No 104), Mozart (No 40) and Mendelssohn (the Italian) the following week.