FROM CELEBRITY 6 TO CELEBRITY 17 | Will Conway, Artistic Director

FROM CELEBRITY 6 TO CELEBRITY 17

Will Conway, Artistic Director

A founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (and 40 years on, still its principal cellist), past principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and current Artistic Director of the Hebrides Ensemble among many, many other professional responsibilities, Will Conway joined St Mary’s Music School in 2007 as Head of Strings. Today he is the School’s Artistic Director and the driving force behind the inspired genesis of the Celebrity 6 series, which saw 17 of the world’s most important international professional musicians engage directly with pupils during lockdown.

Q: How does the role of Artistic Director contribute to the vision of St Mary’s Music School?

My role as Artistic Director is to listen to opinions, to lead on ideas, and to identify people who I know will bring something very special to the school. I have always been mindful that while we are a small school in Edinburgh, we are also a national music school, sending our pupils on to establishments throughout the UK and beyond. Other specialist music schools benefit from being further south, closer to London, where there is more access to a wider range of musicians, so we need to get those people to come to us. I’ve made it my responsibility to engage with heads of academies and conservatoires around the country; that, and my work with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and international contacts I’ve made there, have helped me to identify players who can come to us and lead our Nigel Murray and Edinburgh Masterclasses.

“Our public Nigel Murray and Edinburgh Masterclasses are only possible through the generosity of enlightened philanthropy – we can have the best ideas in the world but without philanthropy we can’t make them happen. The funding provided for the public masterclasses has allowed us to invite people like Steven Osborne, Renaud Capuçon, Nicola Benedetti and Nicolas Altstaedt to come to the school.”

Q: Celebrity 6 is a triumph inspired by the adversity of lockdown. Where did the idea come from?

When lockdown happened, there was an amazing response from the School. The collective energy, the creative solutions, the Zoom lessons, the recorded assemblies, the aural work and the fun quizzes all performed an incredibly important, galvanizing role. Paul Stubbings and I discussed how we could continue to deliver our Masterclasses series, John Cameron came on board with great ideas, and together we came up with an online solution using a combination of YouTube recordings and live Zoom. We had eminent musicians from all over the world stuck at home, not able to perform, and a whole term of online provision to create for our pupils. Six events spread throughout that first term seemed to fit and that’s why we called it Celebrity 6.

Q: How did you go about selecting the celebrities?

I looked for people who represented the instruments and disciplines offered by the School and I used my connections, people I’d met or played with in my own professional career, through which to contact and invite these people. I also spoke to our own tutors and teachers and students and asked for their wish lists for instrumentalists and genres too. In the first series we had Tommy Smith – an entirely natural jazz choice for Scotland – and by the third series, at Eve’s suggestion, we had Arve Henriksen, the Norwegian trumpeter. I wanted to make Celebrity 6 as inclusive and collaborative as possible and that’s been an important part of its success. I’m spearheading it and using my own contacts but lots of people have contributed to this.

Q: Did the format changed at all over the three terms?

Yes. To start with, it was about delivering a mini masterclass over a digital platform. It was straightforward for our guests - an hour of their time for the actual session plus a little prep time to review pupil recordings I’d sent in advance. But after the first term, we began to develop the idea of asking people to talk about their career in music and how it was being affected by the pandemic, so it became less about masterclasses and more about giving vision to our pupils.

Q: What do you think the impact of Celebrity 6 has been – and what will be its legacy?

Although it will never entirely replace face-to-face, using a digital platform gave us scope to reach people that otherwise we couldn’t have had in school. It’s been so exciting for our young musicians to have these incredible soloists talking directly to them from wherever they are in the world – Manuel Barrueco was in the US, Gautier Capuçon was in France, Sarah Willis was in Berlin as was Tabea Zimmermann – but they’re connected and sharing their thoughts, right at that very minute, not presenting something written ten years ago. Those sessions were fantastic in terms of our own students understanding what their musical idols were doing, how they were spending their time practicing, what new repertoire they were discovering. Rachel Podger on Baroque music, for example, was fantastic and we’ve now got on record a little session on the way to think and play in a Baroque style - that’s an incredibly valuable piece of teaching material. People had unusual and interesting things to say, suggestions about where we’re going as musicians, how performance could be happening in the future.

By the end of the year we’d had 17 of the world’s top international professional musicians in our school, on our screens, teaching our pupils and offering valuable insight into their characters, their aspirations. Together, all of those artists gave us so much to think about, from an insight into the microscopic detail of self-analysis and reflection required to perform and write music well, to their grand visions, their technical brilliance and the inspiration they bring to us all. It’s shown the confidence and ambition of the School and it was a fantastic thing for us to be doing. “As teachers and coaches, we’ve gone down the musical path already; we know where it leads and we know what’s in store for our pupils. Even the ones who don’t plan on being professional musicians will always have music as a big part of their lives and we’re offering a vision to them and a focus. Specialist music schools such as ours offer a huge breadth and depth of teaching and by inviting people to come into the school and work with our pupils, or inspire them with programmes of music, we’re creating an overarching education in music and performing and I think that’s the greatest thing we can do.”

Q: What’s next?

Now that we’re back in the building, we’ll be returning to our Nigel Murray and Edinburgh Masterclasses but we’re running a new Celebrity 6 series too, this time called Creative Thinkers. It’s less about holding masterclasses and more about bringing in people who are instrumentalists… and more. So, our first session was with Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist who is a real polymath, and I’m dreaming up the names I want for the rest of the year – people from all areas of professional music – I need to carefully pick people who won’t just talk about performing but will offer big visions for the music world.

17 WORLD-CLASS MUSICIANS

TERM 1 Angela Hewitt – pianist | Gautier Capuçon – cellist | Rachel Podger – violinist | Lorenza Borrani – violinist Tommy Smith – jazz improvisationist | Lorna McGhee – flautist

TERM 2 Sarah Willis – French horn player, broadcaster and musical educator | Steven Isserlis – cellist Zoë Beyers – violinist and Leader of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra | Malcolm Martineau - piano accompanist Tabea Zimmermann - violist

TERM 3 Arve Henriksen - trumpeter and composer | Stephen Hough - pianist, composer and writer Manuel Barrueco – classical guitarist | Sir Antonio Pappano – Music Director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome Judith Weir – composer and Master of the Queen’s Music | Alina Ibragimova – violinist