Sir Neville Marriner, CH, CBE (15 April 1924 – 2 October 2016) was an English conductor and violinist.

[4][5][6] He had met the harpsichordist Thurston Dart while recuperating from kidney damage during the war, and they formed a duo together, which expanded to the Virtuoso String Trio with Peter Gibbs.

[4][6][7] He also played with the chamber orchestras of Reginald Jacques and Boyd Neel, as well as the London Mozart Players.

[4][5] In 1958 he founded the Academy of St Martin in the Fields; initially a twelve-member chamber ensemble, it soon expanded to a chamber orchestra, and attracted musicians of a high calibre including Dart, Iona Brown, Christopher Hogwood and Alan Loveday.

[11] His obituary in The Telegraph praises the Academy of St Martin in the Fields' interpretations of baroque and classical music as "fresh, technically brilliant", and describes them as a "revelation".

[5] Marriner preferred modern instruments and effects, and his work came under criticism by Hogwood, among others, for not striving for an "authentic" sound.

[4] He supervised the Mozart selections for the soundtrack of the Oscar-winning 1984 film Amadeus; it became one of the most popular classical music recordings of all time, selling over 6.5 million copies.

They had two children - Susie, a writer and Andrew, a clarinettist who often worked with his father and who was the principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra for many years.

[18] The Marriner 100 programme commenced on 15 April, the actual centenary day, with a concert at the orchestra’s spiritual home, St Martin-in-the-Fields, directed/conducted by leader Tomo Keller, music director Joshua Bell and former Academy flautist Jaime Martin, in which former members of the Academy Chorus, who had sung under Marriner, performed a suite from Die Schöpfung.

[19] BBC Radio 3 broadcast the concert as the climax of its Neville Marriner Day, with all its programmes devoted to his life, work and legacy.

[28] In 1990 the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Marriner its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his life's work.

[5] Marriner won three Grammy Awards for his recordings of Haydn's The Creation (1982), the soundtrack for Amadeus (1985) and violin concertos by Brahms and Stravinsky (2003).