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Paul Robertson, Medici Quartet violinist – obituary

Paul Robertson CREDIT: ELLIOTT FRANKS / ARENAPAL

12 AUGUST 2016 • 5:55PM

Paul Robertson, the violinist, who has died aged 63, was for almost 40 years the leader of the Medici Quartet, one of the pre-eminent postwar British string quartets; in 2008 he suffered a “near-death experience”, which he wrote about with eloquence and candour.

From the moment he put a violin beneath his chin at the age of eight, Robertson was a natural player. However, an unorthodox upbringing placed him at a disadvantage.

He recalled how Yehudi Menuhin and his circle “seemed to me to belong to an entirely alien, godlike species”, while at the Royal Academy of Music he turned up for classes in his pyjamas. Later he was confounded when the pianist Clifford Curzon tried to teach him the correct way to take afternoon tea.

Confronted with authority, his first instinct was to rebel. He refused to take part in harmony and counterpoint classes, declined the leader’s seat in the Academy orchestra and argued with his teacher about not competing in an international violin competition. “I must have been a complete pain in the bum,” he wrote.

His near-death experience came after leaving the Medici Quartet, when he collapsed while shaving. He later wrote about the remarkable visions of Heaven and Hell he experienced while in a coma.

In one he found himself “worshipping an Asiatic goddess”, while Indian chants were a feature of others. Not all were pleasurable: “At the end of one elaborate dream involving a bloody medieval pig slaughter, I found myself standing outside the train station in Twickenham.”

The Medici Quartet in 1977 - Paul Robertson is standing in the middle. The others are: Stephen Morris - 2nd violin, Ivo-Jan von der Werff - viola and Anthony Lewis - cello CREDIT: CLIVE BARDA / ARENAPAL

Paul Alan Reuben Robertson was born in East London on November 1 1952, to a Jewish mother and atheist father; both had rebelled against their respective families, only marrying to save their son the stigma of illegitimacy. They moved to Oxford where, until Paul was aged six, they lived a frugal existence in a caravan – 300 yards from where he would one day receive an honorary fellowship at Green Templeton College.

Offered free lessons at school for a term on either recorder or violin, he opted for the latter. Later his father sold the family’s van to pay for more tuition – with Manoug Parikian, who demanded four hours’ practice a day – while an £80 pools win covered the cost of a new instrument.

He scraped the five O-levels – “one at least by dint of some judicious cheating” – needed to gain entry to the Royal Academy of Music, which he entered aged 15, continuing to study with Parikian, whom he described as “every inch Toad of Toad Hall” on account of the Turkish-born violinist’s English affectations.

Sidney Griller coached him in chamber music and Neville Marriner tried to turn his head to conducting, on one occasion asking for help auditioning hopeful violinists for the Academy orchestra – though Robertson felt he had to decline on account of having enjoyed romantic entanglements with all but one of the candidates. “If I had followed his advice, I have no doubt I would certainly have become another baton-wielding monster,” he said.

The Medici Quartet started life when Robertson was 19. “I assumed that if I gathered the best players of my generation, learnt and thoroughly rehearsed the music, in time a seamless homogenous group would naturally emerge,” he wrote. When he failed to get his own way through “bullying and sarcasm”, he chose instead to “cajole them into acquiescence”.

To prepare for their Wigmore Hall debut in 1973 the Quartet played a lunchtime concert at All Souls’, Langham Place. Because of confusion over the starting time, however, the audience consisted of three sleeping tramps and a dog. Yet Robertson insisted that the show must go on even though the dog also fell asleep.

Soon the Quartet – whose other founding members were David Matthews (violin), Paul Silverthorne (viola) and Anthony Lewis (cello) – had recording contracts, concert engagements and university residencies. Over the years there were changes of personnel, but Robertson remained as leader until the pressure and responsibility grew too much.

The crunch came during a disastrous concert at the University of Lancaster, where the promoter had requested the Debussy Quartet but Robertson had erroneously rehearsed his colleagues in Ravel’s Quartet. They were all familiar with the Debussy, but Robertson felt unprepared. “I found myself in a deep crisis, distraught and out of control,” he wrote of the leadership ebbing away from him.

He later turned the situation to his advantage, using his first-hand experience of group dynamics as a case study at Harvard Business School and asking prospective executives to suggest what he did next.

“Only a very few correctly predicted that I had refused to play and left the stage,” he wrote. In later life he was a cultural leader for the World Economic Forum at Davos, but disliked the “feeling of shame and self-loathing that I should even wish to enter such an amoral playground”.

The Medici Quartet before a charity performance at Guy's Hospital Chapel in 2004: Paul Robertson is furthest right CREDIT: ELLIOTT FRANKS / ARENAPAL

Meanwhile, he was developing an interest in how music affects the mind. With his wife Chika Yamauchi, an American-born violinist whom he had married in 1981, he set up at their home in West Sussex the Music Mind Spirit Trust, which pursues research in music and its relationship to medicine, leadership, learning and spirituality.

Shortly before illness struck he had been in contact with the composer John Tavener about Towards Silence, a piece for four string quartets that is a musical depiction of a near-death experience. After his recuperation – and Tavener’s from a heart attack – the first performance was heard at Winchester Cathedral in 2009.

Too ill after that to continue playing, Robertson lamented the sale of his instrument: “To me, playing the violin was never just a career choice but for all sorts of reasons the central core of my existence: it was my closest friend, confidant, comrade and lover.”

Robertson had recently finished his memoir, Soundscapes: A Musician’s Journey Through Life and Death, which will be published by Faber & Faber in September.

He is survived by Chika and by their son and two daughters.

Paul Robertson, born November 1 1952, died July 26 2016

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ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC TEACHERS

Achmad Kevin Ihza

Sabtu, 21 Januari 2017

Paul Robertson

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