During the COVID-19 lockdown Louise created a myriad of projects for the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Strings Department, including initiating a multi-track of around 70 students performing Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ conducted by Julian Lloyd Webber to coincide with Elgar’s birthday on 2 June.
In addition, she created a series of 11 ‘live’ online viola recitals featuring Royal Birmingham Conservatoire viola students, giving students the chance to continue to perform ‘live’ whilst simultaneously raising funds for the ARCO Project. Louise commissioned 10 pieces from the South African composer Monthati Masebe to pay tribute to the 10 Rivonia Trialists especially for this series.
‘Baleka Bob’ a tribute to Bob Hepple
‘Backroom Boy’ a tribute to Andrew Mlangeni
‘Color me welcome’ a tribute to Walter Sisulu
‘Golden’ a tribute to Arthur Goldreich
‘Bombs, books and guitars’ a tribute to Govan Mbeki
‘Kathy’ a tribute to Ahmed Kathrada
‘Madiba, dlomo, Yem-Yemen’ a tribute to Nelson Mandela
‘A Healthy Grave’ a tribute to James Kantor
‘Unlearning to heal the wounds’ a tribute to Elias Motsoaledi
‘Afritechture’ a tribute to Lionel Bernstein
‘Hindemith Cavalcade’ a project involving twenty-three RNCM students and Dr Luitgard Schader, a musicologist from the Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt travelled to the 37th International Viola Congress in South Africa to perform the complete viola works (including all the chamber music with viola) by Paul Hindemith. The project included eleven concerts, a full-length play, Der Bratschenfimmel written by Hindemith, pre-concert talks and two lecture-recitals. The ‘Hindemith Cavalcade’ was an enormous undertaking, eighteen months in the making, hundreds of hours organising programmes, rehearsals, teaching, researching, travelling to the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt and organising flights, accommodation and all other details related to the tour. RNCM students learnt an incredible amount preparing for the recitals and received rave reviews and positive feedback from the international violists in attendance.
Louise visited Yale University in January 2010 for the first time and had the opportunity to study the complete Paul Hindemith Collection. The result of this visit was an invitation to deliver a talk and concerts on Hindemith’s birthday (16 November 2010) at Yale with RNCM students.
This was a collaborative project with Yale University in November 2010. A group of ten RNCM students travelled with Louise to New York, having lessons from Samuel Rhodes (violist of the Juilliard Quartet) and Paul Neubauer (New York Philharmonic). At Yale, lessons from Ettore Causa, a lecture on Hindemith, with the visit culminating in an evening recital in the Sudler Hall on the anniversary of Hindemith’s 115th Birthday.
In November 2011 Louise organized for 12 RNCM students to deliver a week-long series of concerts in Frankfurt, Hanau, Mainz and Leipzig to coincide with Hindemith’s Birthday Celebrations, working with the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt. This was a collaboration with staff and students from the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt, performing much rarely heard solo and chamber music by Paul Hindemith. All concerts were reviewed in national German newspapers. RNCM students had lessons from Roland Glassl (Frankfurt) and Tatjana Masurenko (Leipzig) while Louise gave lessons to students in both institutions on an Erasmus Staff Exchange.
Collaborative project between the Britten-Pears Foundation and Pro Corda, International Chamber Music Academy based at Leiston Abbey in Suffolk initiated by myself as Director of Chamber Music at Pro Corda. The Pro Corda/Britten-Pears Foundation collaborative project came to fruition during the summer of 2009. Students from the Primary (age 10-12), Junior (age 12-14), Intermediate (age 14-16) and Senior Courses (age 16-18) were privileged to be the first people to ever perform a selection of Benjamin Britten’s juvenile chamber music. Since there are over 800 early works by Benjamin Britten, Pro Corda was advised as to which music was most significant and after lengthy afternoon meetings a final list of compositions to be performed was drawn up. The music selected was a veritable journey through the childhood fantasies, woes, tribulations and adolescent dramas of Benjamin Britten, age ten to eighteen. This project involved over 350 students between the ages of ten to eighteen (2009).
