Richard Marlow

Richard Marlow matured within a setting of longstanding establishments, guiding their artistic legacies through a period that questioned longstanding conventions. As a chorister at Southwark Cathedral he performed during Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. He pursued his studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge University, serving first as organ scholar and later as research fellow under Thurston Dart, the musicologist and harpsichordist whose collaborative recordings of English Renaissance repertoire alongside Alfred Deller and Gustav Leonhardt introduced that repertory anew to audiences of the 1950s and 1960s. Marlow emerged as the most persuasive successor to Dart’s ability to convert rigorous yet potentially austere research into vibrant musical experience, a gift borne out by his extensive broadcast and recorded work. His doctoral thesis examined the seventeenth-century composer Giles Farnaby, whose music he also edited while contributing the corresponding entry to The New Grove. Marlow’s sympathetic insight into such unconventional voices appears in his remark that Farnaby “was an instinctive composer with something original to say and sufficient conviction to put it across effectively. His music is correspondingly vital, telling; at its best it has a spontaneity and charm few of his contemporaries can rival.” This discerning outlook extended beyond early music to embrace Fauré, Duruflé, Poulenc, Messiaen, Vaughan Williams, and Walton. Following a period of instruction at the University of Southampton, he returned to Cambridge in 1968, assuming the roles of fellow, organist, lecturer, and director of music at Trinity College in succession to Raymond Leppard. Founded by King Henry VIII in 1546, Trinity College maintained an exclusively male choir until female undergraduates were first admitted in the 1970s. In 1982 Marlow formed the mixed-voice ensemble that subsequently toured across Europe as well as in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Under his direction the choir produced numerous prize-winning recordings distinguished both by their polished ensemble and by their illuminating attention to previously marginal composers, most notably two discs devoted to Sweelinck’s Cantiones sacrae that rescued that master from his reputation as a one-work figure and restored something of the international standing he had enjoyed during his lifetime. Marlow has held visiting professorships at institutions in Tokyo, the United States, and New Zealand.