THE FACT will not have escaped violinist Robert McFall that a few days after he played his last concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, on tour in Budapest at the end of May, the SCO announced as its new principal conductor a young Russian as yet unborn when he first joined the band. 29-year-old Maxim Emelyanychev was the immediate choice of the players to fill the vacancy after he stepped into direct a programme of Schubert and Dvorak in March when the departing Robin Ticciati was unwell, but he will not start work until the autumn of next year. Mr McFall, having put in a 30 year shift at the SCO, is meanwhile looking at a very busy autumn 2018 with the chamber group that bears his name, and which has had a huge influence on music-making in Scotland.

Meeting Robert McFall to chat about his career in the orchestra ends up as anything but that. Mr McFall’s Chamber, which itself ticked off a twentieth anniversary in 2016, is presenting no fewer than five new programmes of work between this month and the end of the year, beginning in Old St Paul’s Church in Edinburgh and St John’s Kirk, Perth on June 19 and 20. Under the banner At Home in a Foreign Land, the thread that links the season is to do with dislocation, immigration and exile, and it includes collaborations with soprano Susan Hamilton and tenor Jamie MacDougall, jazz composers Paul Harrison and Mike Kearney and drummer Stu Brown, and pianist Graeme McNaught.

Timing his departure from the SCO to coincide with that of his wife, Ann, from her teaching job at Heriot Watt University was in the McFall plan, but taking it easy in retirement decidedly is not.

“I spent a lot of last year making funding applications until finally we had one accepted,” he says, “so this is all out of that, which is why it is all happening at once. It gives us several new programmes for talking to promoters, so I am hoping that we’ll tour next April.”

Robert and Ann moved with their young family to Edinburgh at the end of 1987, after he gave up his job in the violin section of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London “rather on a whim”

“I was in the Philharmonia for five years and at that point I thought five years was quite long enough to be in an orchestra. We were living outside London and I had an awkward commute so I rang Sally Beamish, whom I knew and who was principal viola at the SCO at the time, and asked if there were any vacancies. She gave me the number of the orchestra ‘fixer’ and he invited me to go on a three week SCO tour, which I thought was a bit foolish as he didn’t know who I was!”

The tour served as an audition and McFall started as a member of the orchestra at the start of 1988 as a member of the orchestra then under the conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste. It was some eight years later that a conversation with his section leader, Peter Campbell-Kelly, who now leads the second fiddles at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, sowed the seeds for his own group.

“He had a piano trio, the Leda Trio and I used to help them out with practical things, turning pages and putting posters up. But Peter was frustrated that their audiences were not huge and quite elderly and he felt they ought to make an effort to find a new audience.

“And at the same time my sons were playing in experimental rock venues in Edinburgh, so we were invited to play at a club called The Transporter Rooms which happened in the Cowgate. It played exotic music: sometimes it would be punk, sometimes Indian music, sometimes electronics and they wanted some avant garde classical music. In fact we didn’t do anything very avant garde; we played some Webern, and Arvo Part and a few arrangements of some poppy things as well, and some Purcell, and it went down very well.”

The core of that group, in which Campbell-Kelly and McFall were joined by SCO viola Brian Schiele and cellist Su-a Lee, has remained the nucleus of Mr McFall’s Chamber ever since. Bassist Rick Standley is another member of 20 years standing and violinist Greg Lawson, who now directs the GRIT orchestra celebrating the music of Martyn Bennett, took over from Campbell-Kelly as first violin for a few years. By that time, the unique path the McFalls had embarked upon was well-mapped and Robert McFall’s reckons it had been too much for one of its original architects.

“Peter Campbell-Kelly kind of burned out after a year. He started to be quite alarmed at his own invention but he was the main moving force behind the most adventurous things we did. He was very fearless with an absurd sense of humour.”

Su-a Lee, who had joined the SCO from the Juilliard School in New York, remembers that first gig as the start of a heady time.

“As well as Webern and Shostakovich, Robert had made an arrangement of Hendrix’s Little Wing that really turned it on its head, and we also played Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive. We were on after midnight and there were people dancing to Webern!”

From there on the newly-named group was invited to curate its own evening on the last Sunday of each month at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club, then in its original home, under the banner None of the Above. Their guests there included Chilean singer Valentina Montoya Martinez, dancer Dawn Hartley, actor and director Cora Bissett, then playing cello in the group Swelling Meg, and singer-songwriter Dominic Harris, aka Dominic Waxing Lyrical.

In between musical numbers, as well as poetry reading, McFalls would invite presentations from experts in other fields. Su-a Lee remembers a scientist from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh explaining the sex life of moths, and a useful tutorial on bicycle puncture repairs.

McFall’s own music found its way into the group’s set as well, on beautiful hand-written scores, supposedly the work of an obscure hermit composer who lived in a cave in the Transylvanian mountains.

“Robert is somebody who gives everything all of the time, but he really comes into his own with McFalls,” she says. “He’s the best arranger I know, really second to none. He makes everyone in the group feel that he has written them the best part.

“Playing with McFalls opened up a whole other world of music-making for me. I don’t think I’d have stayed at the SCO without that – it opened up Scotland for me.”

In fact Mr Fall’s Chamber did that for many more than the cellist. Breaking down barriers between classical and folk and jazz musicians, its anarchic spirit chimed with liked-minded musicians – touring in the Highlands alongside Martyn Bennett’s group for example – and broke down barriers between different practices that had rarely met each other before. The group’s discography encompasses the music of South America and the Baltics, Bennett and Gavin Bryars, and associations with Dundonian bard Michael Marra and prog-rock veteran Robert Fripp.

That eclecticism is maintained in the programme of work that McFalls start this month with Exil, a work for soprano, strings, flute and synthesiser by Georgian Giya Kancheli, a Soviet contemporary of Part and Schnittke. In August at the Fringe in the Queen’s Hall and Edinburgh’s Brunton the SCO’s principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin joins the string players and their jazz associates for a programme that includes the premiere of Red Blue Balance by Vivian Barty-Taylor.

McFall explains: “He uses his own invented tuning system and rhythms that are more like speech, so I had to devise a new notation for that. We have had one session on it so far, just to decide if it was a piece we’d be able to play! So that’s a bit of a shot in the dark.”

October will see a programme of Mexican popular songs and Mexican chamber music, November has music from Poland. “They are both nations that are very successful economic migrants and both are hugely influential musically as well,” says McFall.

In December the group teams up with pianist Graeme McNaught to bring the series to a conclusion, featuring works by Mozart, Mendelsssohn and Piazzola. “They were all composers who were very cosmopolitan, lived in different places at different times and travelled a lot and absorbed influences from different traditions.”

Returning briefly to the ostensible reason for our chat, McFall concedes that saying farewell to the SCO was “a painful business”. “Every time I played something, I’d think, ‘Well this is the last time I play this, with this orchestra anyway.’”

But after three-quarters of an hour on matters McFall, he adds a controversial rider to that thought: “I won’t miss Beethoven symphonies. I do seem to have played them an awful lot.”

Mr McFall’s Chamber play Old St Paul’s, Edinburgh on June 19 and St John’s Kirk, Perth on June 20.

mcfalls.co.uk