La Speranza
Biography La Speranza
La Speranza
brings hope and beauty to audiences through vibrant, life-affirming performances of both time-honored and overlooked chamber music of the 18th and 19th centuries. By exploring the expressive possibilities of historical instruments, we open a conduit to birth new and relevant musical experiences from the sounds of the past, connecting us in the present day with each other, our community, and the world at large.
We are a group of four dynamic women who love to perform and be together in music-making. Director and founder Yvonne Smith envisioned a string-based historical ensemble for Houston and beyond in 2016, and has worked ever since to make it a reality.
Yvonne Smith
At age nine when her family was living in upstate New York, Yvonne Smith chose to learn to play the viola because of its rich, dark sound, its supporting role in ensembles … and her acute distaste for high notes, which would have been inevitable, had she chosen to play the violin. Her love for the viola grew throughout her childhood years and several cross-country moves, and she eventually grew to tolerate and even embrace high notes.
Yvonne was first introduced to early music as a teenager when she heard and fell in love with a recording of Corelli’s violin concerti by Philharmonia Baroque. She began seriously pursuing historical performance shortly after completing her modern viola performance degrees from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University (B.Mus’13, M.Mus’ 15). While at Rice, she studied with James Dunham and Joan DerHovsepian.
In addition to performing with and directing La Speranza, Yvonne enjoys a full schedule as a performing and teaching artist on both modern and baroque viola. She has appeared as soloist with and as a member of Lyra Baroque (Minneapolis, MN) and American Bach Soloists (San Francisco, CA). She also has a thriving viola studio of private students ranging from age 8 to adult and is a contracted substitute in the Houston Symphony viola section for the 2024-2025 season. Yvonne’s baroque viola was made by Timothy Johnson in 2017 after a viola by Andrea Guarneri, made in 1676.
