A big welcome to Sophie Gledhill, Cellist, who joins the coaching team for this summer's course.
Sophie is a highly experienced professional from the UK, and quite apart from her beautiful musical qualities - which she will bring to bear in Naters! - Sophie comes with fine credentials when it comes to caring for the environment.
Cellist Sophie Gledhill is happiest in a theatre, up a mountain or planning her next adventure. She is passionate about protecting the environment and promoting the wide-ranging benefits of both music and nature.
Before the pandemic Sophie could often be found performing with English NationalOpera, English Touring Opera, Birmingham Royal Ballet and in the West Endstaged concert production of Les Misérables. In summer 2019 she premiered two operas at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada: Silent Light, a chamber opera by Paola Prestini, and No One’s Safe, an immersive murder mystery opera by Nicole Lizée set among cabins in the woods.
In 2016 Sophie was cast in Opera for the Unknown Woman, an ‘eco-feminist sci-fi multimedia drama’, in which she sang and played scored and improvised music. She has also freelanced with three of the BBC orchestras over the past decade.
During the pandemic, Sophie’s streamed performances have included a programme of Russian chamber works for the Pushkin House Festival and a concert of chamber music by Vivaldi at the Wallace Collection. She has performed chamber music for oboe and strings with the Finzi Ensemble and, for Conway Hall Sunday Concerts, chamber works with soprano Louise Kemény including Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2.
After graduating with her master’s degree, Sophie stayed in the USA for a summer to teach cello and chamber music at Belvoir Terrace Performing Arts Summer Camp in Lenox, Massachusetts.
For a number of years she was a tutor for the National Children’s String Sinfonia of Great Britain, and is currently the cello tutor for the undergraduate Actor Musician course at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts.
In 2018, as a member of the Global Leaders Program facilitated by the Orchestra of the Americas, Sophie tutored young string players at socially motivated music initiatives in the rainforest of Chilean Patagonia and on Easter Island.
During the COVID-19 lockdown she ran the Toki Rapa Nui Global Support Campaign, raising £12,000 to support Latin America's first 100% environmentally sustainable school of the arts.
Sophie’s experience on Easter Island inspired the recent launch of CelloTrek, her ongoing project to record a piece of music from every country of the world to highlight stories of environmental and cultural sustainability.
Sophie read music at the University of Cambridge before receiving a masters degree in cello performance from the Eastman School of Music, USA, where she studied with Steven Doane.
See Sophie's wonderful video about the Easter Island experience