Where are they now?
Juliette Roos Mendelssohn on Mull 2019
An occasional series of posts about how our artists’ careers have developed since their Mendelssohn on Mull experience.
Some quartets, like the Doric, have violinists who always occupy the same seat. Others enjoy a certain flexibility, in that their violinists take turns, and it’s this role that Juliette fulfils in one of the most exciting British quartets working today.
Juliette came to Mendelssohn on Mull in the second year curated by the Doric. Juliette grew up in London and she attended the Menuhin School and the Guildhall. Her grandmother was the famous Russian violinist Lydia Mordkovich. Lydia came to Mendelssohn on Mull to give master-classes in the 1990s, and Juliette was unaware of this amazing coincidence until after she’d left us, as we were.
Juliette returned to Mull for the second of our Spring Music weeks, in 2020, just before the first national lockdown. We are delighted that she experienced both the week based in Tobermory and the week in Bunessan. In the final concert in Salen she was first violin in the mighty Taneyev Quintet, where she was pitted against two cellos, one of whom was John. And the programme in Bunessan included the First Janacek Quartet, a real feat to put together in a few days, alongside music by Mendelssohn and Haydn.
Mendelssohn on Mull has been such a hugely inspiring week. I feel very privileged to have been able to experience such wonderful music making in a beautiful setting and I am so grateful to the Dorics for being so open, warm and generous.
I know that it's a colossal effort to put on a festival of this nature and so thank you to everyone involved for all the work that's gone in to creating a really brilliant week that I'm sure will stay with me for a very long time.
The Heath Quartet was founded in 2002 by students at the Royal Northern College of Music. They can be said to specialise in music of the present day, although of course they play music from the whole repertoire. Perhaps their most impressive achievement is their set of the five quartets by Michael Tippett, which won a Gramophone Award in 2016.
Juliette’s new colleagues will have been looking for a very resourceful musician, fearless in the face of technical complexity. We hope that Juliette’s weeks on Mull helped to build the artist worthy of a place in this prestigious ensemble. We wish her all the very best!
