The Telegraph, UK
July 9 2005
The small festival with a big message
(Filed: 09/07/2005)
Andrew O’Hagan goes to a small chamber music festival
We are in the middle of the festivals season, and already we have
under our belts the blissed-out pyrotechnics of Glastonbury, the
inspired revivalism of Patti Smith’s Meltdown at the Festival Hall,
and the upscale literary banter at Hay-on-Wye.
But last week, I was privileged to go to the Isle of Mull and spend a
few days at one of the smaller festivals, Mendelssohn on Mull. This
proved to be spectacularly good news for the future of chamber music
in Britain.
With some of Scotland’s most stunning landscapes at their backs, a
young, international troupe of musicians was exposed to the demands
of playing at the highest level in the mentoring company of some of
the very best string instrumentalists.
I have scarcely heard Haydn and Brahms played with greater brio and
enthusiasm, and the whole shebang – professional dedication, youthful
curiosity, public enjoyment, sun, scenery, and single malts – served
to make the festival one of the undoubted highlights of the cultural
year so far.
Picture the scene. The water in the Sound of Mull very still on a
summer’s evening, the hills placid and memorial, swifts and plovers
cutting through the air above an ancient castle. At Gruline Church,
five young people – an Estonian, a Swede, an Armenian, and two Scots
– were working beautifully together to surmount the sonorities of
Brahms’s String Sextet
No 2 in G major. The sixth member of the group, playing with inspired
delicacy, was Gabrielle Lester, a former associate leader of the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and current director of the Ambache
Chamber Ensemble. In the cosy environs of the old church, with
evening light at the windows and the midges dancing in hungry
attendance at the door, Lester led these young professionals into a
deeper understanding of what they were playing and how to play it for
a live audience.
“The festival has developed unrecognisably,” she said. “These young
people are so musically mature that we can quite quickly raise them
on to a higher level. If you went to the Wigmore Hall you’d be
perfectly happy with this, and tonight, in fact, was probably a
better atmosphere.”
I asked her how mentoring actually worked. “The point of mentoring is
that you can offer them this higher experience of performance which
they adopt and have as their own. I can’t give them that just by
saying it, but by doing it with them. It makes these young people
become different players. In a typical music college that doesn’t
happen. The setting too, here on Mull, is a big part of the
experience.”
The walls of Gruline Church are covered with plaques and
commemorations to the noble dead. I notice that two kinsmen, Cay and
Cheape, were killed in action on the same day, Easter 1916. A sense
of elegy, and a different sense of youth, comes from a smaller group
of the musicians as they play the Adagio from Haydn’s String Quartet
in B minor.
I asked Levon Chilingirian, the festival’s artistic director and a
professor at the Royal College of Music, what he thought of recent
arguments which suggested that classical music was making no headway
with young people.
“It’s important to bring chamber music to life for younger people,”
he said. “You have to take it to schools and you have to invite young
people to concerts. And this festival plays its part. If young
musicians have the opportunity to walk and breathe here, then they
can’t fail to be inspired by this landscape.”
The young musicians were awed by the mentors but also by the pubs of
Tobermory. When I spoke to them, many told stories of being not
terrifically happy in the hothouse conditions of music schools and
colleges, but loving the exacting freedoms of coming to Mendelssohn
on Mull. At Iona Abbey, the 6th-century seat of St Columba and
resting place of the Scottish kings, a company of all the musicians
played for a sell-out audience.
The Isle of Iona has seen a millennium and a half of risings and
fallings, Christian foundations and Norse sackings, pilgrimages, the
making of the Book of Kells and all of it seemed, to my mind, to be
gently augmented by this company of musicians from all over the
world, playing Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, the rising and
falling sound expanding one’s hopes on a rainy day.
The festival was founded by the celebrated violinist, the late
Leonard Friedman, and the chairman for the past 14 years has been
Marita Crawley.
“I always think of what Leonard would’ve thought if he’d seen it
now,” she said. “It started as something of a classical jamming
session and now it is this, serious musicians passing on their
knowledge to the talent of tomorrow. It’s about performance, the
mentors sharing equally with the young musicians the decisions and
choices about how to play a piece, and I have such a feeling of pride
in how the first vision of this festival has developed and grown.”
Early the next day, with a promising sun rising over Mull, I watched
Marita Crawley as our ferry passed to the mainland. This is her last
year as chairman, she says, and she is happy to leave the festival in
capable hands.
“It’s got its own momentum now,” she said. “It has always grabbed
people’s imagination. Even though it is small, its effect on
individual musicians, their playing, their lives, has been so
altering. You can’t always change the world but you can alter these
few lives and that is the glory of the thing.” I found myself in full
agreement as the boat passed on, and I thought of some larger
implications.
Chamber music offers a perfect definition of human co-operation, and
I wondered if it did not in itself provide a quiet example to those
famous people gathering on the other side of Scotland for the G8,
that potentially life-changing and possibly discordant octet.