Cellist Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, London, clareoconnell

CELLIST CURATOR ILLUSTRATOR

Clare O’Connell is a cellist who is passionate about playing and curating chamber music. She is a member of the Le Page Trio, Lontano, The Storytellers Ensemble, The Harborough Collective, Loki & Propellor Ensemble and is a regular collaborator with many other chamber music & chamber opera projects.

She founded and curates Behind The Mirror: her own series of intimate chamber music concerts in Berkhamsted, commissioning new music from composers Alex Mills, Leonardo Margutti, Luke Bedford, David Bruce, Freya Waley Cohen and Rubens Askenar, experimenting with varying instrumental line-ups, making her own arrangements of a vast array of music for unusual groups of instruments, and interweaving music poetry and storytelling to add another dimension to the concert experience. Her arrangements have been performed in Westminster Abbey, the Wigmore Hall and on BBC radio 3.

Clare regularly plays all over the UK. Recent highlights include a performance in the Wigmore Hall of her own arrangement of The Lark Ascending with Daniel Pioro, a solo performance in ‘An Elephant in the Garden’ at Shakespeare’s Globe’s storytelling Festival & playing the solo cello part in Sam Bordoli’s miniature music theatre piece for tenor and cello ‘Belongings’ as part of the Invisible Opera House inquiry programme. She is currently collaborating with composer Dominic Shovelton on a new album of music for cello & electronics inspired by the remote landscape of Dungeness, & planning Behind the Mirror's 2020/1 series.

She is a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford where she studied Ancient & Modern History followed by postgraduate study at the Royal College of Music & the Hochshule für Künste in Bremen, Germany with internationally acclaimed cellist and teacher Alexander Baillie. She plays on a cello by Stefan Krattenmacher.