Antigoni Goni (born 8 March 1969) [1] is a Greek guitarist, recording artist, and performer, who was the founder and Chair of the Pre-College Division of the Guitar Department at the Juilliard School
Goni was born in Athens, Greece, and studied with Evangelos Assimakopoulos at the National Conservatory of Athens, with John Mills at the Royal Academy of Music in London and extensively in master classes with Julian Bream. She continued her studies with Sharon Isbin at the Juilliard School in New York.
She has performed throughout the United States, Japan, Portugal, France, and other countries. Her career blossomed in the mid-1990s after winning the Guitar Foundation of America competition, which resulted in some 65 concerts in North America and a contract with Naxos Records for which she has recorded three highly successful CDs. Goni released an additional solo album, Hymn to the Muse, under Timespan Recordings in 2016. [2]
Goni is a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, and artist-in-residence for San Francisco Performances. She was Chairman of the Guitar Department at Juilliard Pre-College Division between 1995 and 2004, and she currently holds positions at Columbia University and the Royal Academy of Music in London, splitting her time between both coasts of the United States, Brussels and Athens.
In 2007 Goni founded The Volterra Project, a holistic guitar workshop held in Volterra, Italy each summer. [3]
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Sharon Isbin is a classical guitarist and the founding director of the guitar department at the Juilliard School.
Pamela Frank is an American violinist, with an active international career across a varied range of performing activity. Her musicianship was recognized in 1999 with the Avery Fisher Prize, one of the highest honors given to American instrumentalists. In addition to her career as a performer, Frank holds the Herbert R. and Evelyn Axelrod Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she has taught since 1996, and is also an Adjunct Professor of Violin at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music since 2018.
Marin Alsop is an American-born Austrian conductor, the first woman to win the Koussevitzky Prize for conducting and the first conductor to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Ravinia Festival. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2020. On June 5, 2023, she was named as the artistic director and conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Zoran Dukić is a Croatian classical guitarist. Between 1990 and 1997, Dukić won more competitions than any other guitarist had at the time.
Kevin R. Gallagher is a guitarist who plays both the electric guitar and the classical guitar. As a classical guitarist, he has received top honors at some of the most prestigious guitar competitions in the world, including the 1993 Guitar Foundation of America, the 1994 American String Teachers Association, the 1993 Artists International Competition, and 1997 Francisco Tárrega Guitar Competition in Spain. As an electric guitarist, he is known for transcribing violin music for electric guitar and for founding the avant-rock ensemble Electric Kompany. He has also produced, in cooperation with John Zorn, a music festival titled "Full Force: The New Rock Complexity" that showcases bands that have combined styles such as classical, rock, jazz, and metal. He has produced a CD for Naxos Records titled "Guitar Recital - Music from the Renaissance and Baroque," a duo CD with Antigoni Goni titled "Evocacion," and an EP featuring his work on solo electric guitar and with Electric Kompany.
Eugenia Karagiannidou, better known as Eugenia Manolidou (Μανωλίδου) or Manolides, is a Greek classical composer, conductor, entertainment television presenter and is married to politician and Minister for Development and Investment of Greece Adonis Georgiadis.
Oscar Alberto Ghiglia is an Italian classical guitarist.
JoAnn Falletta is an American conductor.
Vassilis Tsabropoulos is a Greek pianist, conductor, and composer.
Theodore Antoniou, was a Greek composer and conductor. His works vary from operas and choral works to chamber music, from film and theatre music to solo instrumental works. In addition to his career as composer and conductor, he was professor of composition at Boston University. His education included studies in violin, voice, and composition at the National Conservatory of Athens, the Hellenic Conservatory, and conducting at both The Hochschule für Musik and the International Music Centre in Darmstadt. He was a member of the Academy of Athens.
Daniel Blumenthal is a German-born American pianist.
Kati Ilona Agócs is an American-Canadian composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ricardo Jesús Gallén García, is a Spanish classical guitarist who has been active since the mid-1990s. He is currently a professor of guitar at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar, Germany.
Alison Crum, is an English viol player.
Soyeon Kate Lee (이소연) is a Korean-American classical pianist, who currently lives in New York, US. She is on the College and Pre-College piano faculty at the Juilliard School.
Danae Kara is a Greek classical concert pianist, recording artist, and educator, best known for her interpretations of 20th century Greek modernist composers.
Karen Gomyo is a classical violinist.
Stanley Silverman is an American composer, arranger, conductor and guitarist.
Arda Mandikian was a Greek-Armenian soprano opera singer. Mandikian launched her career in England. She took on leading roles in London and Edinburgh. In the 1980s she became the assistant director of the Greek National Opera.