An Idyllic Music Series in the Hebrides

On August 7, 1829, Felix Mendelssohn took a steamer from the Scottish mainland to the grandly rugged island of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. Later that day, the composer wrote to his sister Fanny, “To illustrate how strangely the Hebrides affected me, the following just occurred to me there.” He then set down twenty-one bars of music in B minor, with indications for orchestration: a downward-eddying theme in the violas and cellos, silvery chords in the violins and winds. From that sketch emerged the “Hebrides” Overture, which is sometimes called “Fingal’s Cave,” although Mendelssohn didn’t see that landmark until the next day.

I listened to “The Hebrides” countless times when I was a kid, its surging lines and sea-spray climaxes conjuring Turneresque pictures in my mind. When, in September, I visited Mull for the first time, the island lived up to its musical archetype, looming out of the mist like a mass of gray shrouds thrown onto the ocean. Appropriately, I was on my way to see a chamber-music series called Mendelssohn on Mull, which has been running since 1988. It was founded by the London-born violinist Leonard Friedman, who wished to lead master classes in an atmosphere free of urban pressures. In recent years, Mendelssohn on Mull has had a quartet-in-residence, which gives concerts while providing guidance to younger musicians. This year, the Maxwell Quartet, a mostly Scottish ensemble, took over from the Doric Quartet.

It’s not a Mendelssohn festival. Only three of the composer’s pieces appeared in the programs, amid works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvořák, and Glazunov. Listeners were left to decide for themselves how this largely Central European repertory related to the edge-of-the-world terrain around them. Certainly, the chamber-music classics are suited to the intimacy of the island’s venues—small churches and village halls—and to the informal conviviality of the audience. There’s something to be said for having to wait for an octet of sheep to move grudgingly out of your way as you drive to hear a Haydn quartet. Time slows, noise recedes, and the music comes into focus.

The Maxwell Quartet formed in 2010, when its members were studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Bearded and flannel-clad, they have the affect of a pub band. The cellist Duncan Strachan and the violinist George Smith, the group’s founding members, both grew up playing traditional Scottish music alongside classical fare. (In 2005, Smith took second prize in the Glenfiddich Fiddle Championship.) Later, the violinist Colin Scobie and the violist Elliott Perks joined the group. Both, as it happens, had trained at Mendelssohn on Mull. Perks is the lone Englishman.

One thing that sets the Maxwells apart—and aligns them with the lost-in-time aura of Mull—is their habit of incorporating Scottish reels, jigs, and laments into their programs. They devise the arrangements themselves. Strachan told me, “At first, we played them as encores. But then we thought we could really integrate them into our performances, just to see what kinds of nice confluences could emerge, given how much folk music there is in the core repertory.” Indeed, pieces like “Gregor’s Lament” and “McIntosh’s Lament,” with their desolate melodies and spectral drones, hold their own next to Haydn and Beethoven.

The Maxwells’ folk background also influences how they approach a score like Dvořák’s Quartet No. 13 in G, which they played at a concert in Salen Church. As Strachan explained before the performance—the members take turns talking to the audience, all showing a flair for communicative chat—Dvořák wrote the work after his sojourn in the United States, seeming to wallow happily in a return to a Czech milieu. At the same time, the quartet is a sophisticated, idiosyncratic construction, with tricky rhythmical layering and semi-impressionistic harmony. The Maxwells’ account was sensationally persuasive. The slashing up-and-down motto of the first movement had the rough finish of a Bartók ostinato. Scobie brought off the contrasting triplet-powered theme with a spontaneous lilt; later, Perks gave it a more ruminative feel. Sustained harmonies were sometimes delivered without vibrato, so that they had a raw, ripe power—as in the bagpipe-like drone of “McIntosh’s Lament,” which came next.

The resident quartet, however, isn’t the focus of Mendelssohn on Mull. Only two out of eight programs featured the Maxwells together; at the others, the members split off from one another and formed ad-hoc quartets with younger artists—eight in all—who had come to Mull for an immersion in chamber-music practice. Some were still students; others had already embarked on professional careers. I sat in on a couple of rehearsals to see what messages the Maxwells were imparting. Before getting into details, they often brought up an issue that bedevils conservatory graduates: How do you move beyond technical command to a more personal involvement with the music? Perks, in a rehearsal of Glazunov’s Third Quartet at Dervaig Village Hall, spoke of the “danger of just playing correctly, whereas what we need to do is have fun with it.” Smith, working with three players on Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet at Tobermory Parish Church, wanted more definition of character. “To me, these phrases sound like hunting calls that are growing louder, coming from the hills,” he said. “Think of the gesture over all, less of your own part.”

Strachan later told me, “When we first arrived, a lot of them were very, like, ‘I’ve practiced my part, I’m going to play my part.’ It took a few days to get past that, and we wouldn’t even necessarily take credit. It’s something about the atmosphere, being on an island, being a stranger to everyone. The funny thing is, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory—he is sort of the father of the modern conservatoire. And yet Mendelssohn on Mull is this brilliant liberation from the conservatoire.”

Other than the tour-de-force Dvořák, the most striking event I saw at Mendelssohn on Mull was a midday concert at the Village Hall on the Isle of Iona, off the southwestern tip of Mull. The Irish monk Columba settled on Iona in the sixth century and founded an abbey that became a center of Gaelic Christianity. The ruins of the Iona nunnery were visible from one window of the hall. Through another window, you saw hills, water, gulls, and sky.

Tickets aren’t sold in advance for Mendelssohn on Mull; the series operates on a pay-what-you-want basis. On Iona, nearly two hundred people showed up—more than the population of Iona itself. Richard Jeffcoat, the series’ affable and tireless general manager, started setting up extra chairs. He told me that, unlike many British musical institutions, Mendelssohn on Mull depends largely on private donations. “This means a lot of extra work,” he said. “But it also gives us the freedom to do things our way, without worrying about government bureaucracy.”

What impressed me most was the naturalness of the music-making. The prize was Haydn’s Quartet Opus 77, No. 2, in which Strachan was joined by the violinists Scott Bryant and Kenza Stamselberg and the violist Jemimah Quick. The group had played the piece the day before, in Tobermory; there, it had been characterful but jittery. Bryant had improvised two mini-cadenzas in the Minuet, yet he’d seemed hesitant about them. This time, everything fell into place. Bryant led with confidence, his cadenzas as breezy as the air coming off the Sound of Iona. Stamselberg echoed Bryant’s energy and extended it. Quick, who is only nineteen, exuded mellow authority.

Mendelssohn on Mull veterans were buzzing over what the quartet had achieved. Jeffcoat announced that the Maxwells had already been offered a return engagement. As they greeted new fans—they met locals who specialized in “waulking songs,” traditional melodies that women sang as they beat the cloth—I set out for the other side of the island, to watch the B-minor crash of the waves on the rocks. Mendelssohn never returned to Mull, but, in a sense, he never left. ♦