The classical guitar, also known as Spanish guitar, is a member of the guitar family used in classical music and other styles. An acoustic wooden string instrument with strings made of gut or nylon, it is a precursor of the modern steel-string acoustic and electric guitars, both of which use metal strings. Classical guitars derive from instruments such as the lute, the vihuela, the gittern, which evolved into the Renaissance guitar and into the 17th and 18th-century baroque guitar. Today's modern classical guitar was established by the late designs of the 19th-century Spanish luthier, Antonio Torres Jurado.
Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña was a Spanish virtuoso classical guitarist. Many professional classical guitarists were either students of Segovia or students of Segovia's students. Segovia's contribution to the modern-romantic repertoire included not only commissions but also his own transcriptions of classical or baroque works. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive musical personality, phrasing and style.
Francisco Peña Pérez, known as Paco Peña, is a Spanish flamenco composer and guitarist. He is regarded as one of the world's foremost traditional flamenco players.
Julian Alexander Bream was an English classical guitarist and lutenist. Regarded as one of the most distinguished classical guitarists of the 20th century, he played a significant role in improving the public perception of the classical guitar as a respectable instrument. Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Bream also helped revive interest in the lute.
Stephen Cuthbert Vivian Dodgson was a British composer and broadcaster. Dodgson's prolific musical output covered most genres, ranging from opera and large-scale orchestral music to chamber and instrumental music, as well as choral works and song. Three instruments to which he dedicated particular attention were the guitar, harpsichord and recorder. He wrote in a mainly tonal, although sometimes unconventional, idiom. Some of his works use unusual combinations of instruments.
The Wigmore Hall is a concert hall at 36 Wigmore Street, in west London. It was designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt and opened in 1901 as the Bechstein Hall; it is considered to have particularly good acoustics. It specialises in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music and song recitals, and hosts over five hundred concerts each year, as well as a weekly concert broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
John William Duarte was a British composer, guitarist and writer.
David Russell is a classical guitarist. Although he has a wide collection of instruments, he is most known for his association with Matthias Dammann guitars and D’Addario Pro-Arte’ Nylon strings.
Eliot Hamilton Fisk is an American classical guitarist.
Mark Delpriora is an American classical guitarist and composer.
Stephen Marchionda is an American virtuoso classical guitar performer.
Nigel North is an English lutenist, musicologist, and pedagogue.
Richard Anthony Hand, was an English classical guitarist.
Hermann Hauser Sr. was a German luthier. He worked in Munich and later in the Bavarian Reisbach. Guitar models by Hermann Hauser Sr. included the Vienna Model and the Munich Model, the Terz-Guitar, the Prim-Guitar and the Fifth-Bass Guitar (Quintbass). But it was his innovations based on the designs of Antonio de Torres for which he "is generally considered to have been the greatest guitar maker outside Spain." His Torres-based instruments are historically important, having profoundly influenced classical guitar builders and performing artists of the modern era. Andres Segovia described the 1937 Hauser Sr. with which he performed and recorded from 1938 to 1962 as the "greatest guitar of our epoch," and it is one of two Hauser Sr. guitars in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York collection. Met curator of musical instruments Jayson Dobney described Segovia's 1937 Hauser as having "changed music history": "This guitar, as much as Andre Segovia, established classical guitar playing." The British guitarist and lute player Julian Bream described Hausers as "the very essence of classicism in guitar sound" and recorded at least eight of his albums using Hauser Sr. Torres models of various vintages. Renowned antiquarian dealers Christie's and Brompton's Fine & Rare Instruments regularly offer Hauser Sr. guitars at auction. Hauser's Torres model is "one of the most copied guitars of today," with master luthiers such as Simon Ambridge (England), German Vazquez Rubio and Brian Cohen (UK), Paolo Coriani (Italy) and Francisco Navarro Garcia (Mexico) among many others, as well as popular manufacturers such as Cordoba, all offering Hauser-inspired models.
Granada is a piano composition by Isaac Albéniz, the opening piece from his 1886 work Suite Española No. 1. It was premiered by the composer on 24 January 1886..
Marc Ongley is an Australian classical and jazz guitarist, composer, and teacher. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1991. Born in Maitland, New South Wales, he became the first Australian to be awarded the Licentiate of the Trinity College of Music, London (LTCL) and the Fellowship of the Trinity College of Music London (FTCL), in 1974 and 1977 respectively. The Sydney Morning Herald described Ongley as "one of Australia's finest classical guitarists". Ongley studied with the renowned Australian music educator Don Andrews and famous classical guitarists Alirio Diaz and Turibio Santos, students of Andrés Segovia. He recorded and released several classical and jazz albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, Ongley released albums in the genres of blues and rock.
Michael Laucke was a Canadian classical, new flamenco and flamenco guitarist and composer. Starting at the age of thirteen, Laucke gave professional snooker demonstrations and his winnings allowed him to take trips from Montreal to New York City to study the classical guitar with Rolando Valdés-Blain. With a career spanning over 30 years, Laucke began performing in 1965, recording the first of 16 albums in 1969, and toured in 25 countries. In 1971, he performed his first of many concerts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His first concert in New York, where he also first met Senator Claiborne Pell, took place in 1972.
Sean Shibe is a classical and electric guitarist from Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He is of English and Japanese ancestry. He studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and with Italian guitarist Paolo Pegoraro. His debut album was described as "not just great guitar playing... the best [the jury] had ever heard" by BBC Music Magazine, and "the best solo guitar disc I've heard" by The Arts Desk.
Laura Snowden is a British-French classical guitarist and composer. She is widely regarded as one of the leading classical guitarists of her generation since being handpicked by Julian Bream to continue his legacy of performing new commissions by leading contemporary composers, including Julian Anderson and Olli Mustonen.
Benjamin Verdery is an American classical guitarist, composer and teacher. Verdery has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, and Wigmore Hall (London). He has played and recorded with a wide range of classical and other musicians, including guitarists William Coulter, Leo Kottke, Paco Peña, Andy Summers and John Williams, vocalist Hermann Prey, composer Anthony Newman, and his wife, flutist Rie Schmidt. New York Times classical music critic Allan Kozinn described Verdery as "one of the guitar’s grand individualists" and "an iconoclastic player," known as much for his devotion to new music and transcriptions of Jimi Hendrix songs as for inventive interpretations of Bach. As of 2021, Verdery had released 19 albums and been featured on several others. He has taught at the Yale School of Music since 1985.
