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Red Rob: the music of Robert Mackintosh

Robert Mackintosh is best known among the Scottish traditional music community for composing what have now become traditional tunes, but in his publications from 1783 onwards, these reels appear alongside chamber music that includes a virtuosic violin sonata, piano variations with violin accompaniment, and minuets in a variety of forms. The twentieth-century tendency to separate ‘classical’ music from other genres has led to performances of Mackintosh’s music concentrating either on one area or the other, featuring musicians with the appropriate experience and expertise for each. However, this dividing of his music into artificial and anachronistic genres adequately represents neither the musical content nor its original cultural context. The aim of this project was to restore the unity of his repertoire, performing and recording Mackintosh’s first volume Airs Minuets Gavotts and Reels with a single group of musicians, as in the 1780s when the Edinburgh Musical Society concerts at St Cecilia’s Hall, and Nathaniel Gow’s dance band at the Assembly Rooms contained many of the same players. For this to be convincing, it required present-day performers who were equally at home in historically-informed performance and in the very different disciplines of traditional music, and who could develop a stylistic vocabulary that needed little modification to be effective across the whole repertoire. The project included public performances around Scotland and at the Festival de Violoncelle de Beauvais in May 2010, and this CD released in March 2013. It was funded by Creative Scotland.