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Reflections on a life of composition Guitarist Cristiano Porqueddu is well known for his remarkable ability in assimilating a wide range of the repertoire for his instrument. In recent times this commitment has included the prodigious task of recording all the music I composed for solo guitar up to the end of 2013, an undertaking for which he invited me to write the notes that would accompany the release. I was happy to oblige, on the condition that my contribution should avoid all critical appraisal of works – ne sutor ultra crepidam – and instead focus briefly on the history of their composition. In 1960, at the age of 18, when my career as a solo guitarist was just getting under way, I began to feel the need to enrich and strengthen my understanding of music through studies of composition. Rather than hoping to write music myself, at the time my aim was to achieve a better grasp of how it was composed so that I could improve my skills as an interpreter and performer. I learned a great deal from the foremost treatises on music but I also had the good fortune to study under a great teacher who happened to live in my hometown of Vercelli. This was the composer and organist Giuseppe Rosetta. Over the course of several years under his guidance I got to grips with harmony and counterpoint, to the extent that I was able to write a fugue correctly. I also taught myself as much as I could about the art of orchestration, reading the treatise by Hector Berlioz and listening to a great many symphonies and concertos while following them with the score. My approach to composition was probably unusual, in that I never felt I wanted to play the piano – teachers could never put up with my guitarist’s nails – and instead used the guitar, with all the restrictions and constraints that this involved regarding exercises in harmony and counterpoint. This limitation forced me to develop an ability to imagine the music written without actually hearing it, or, vice versa, to write the notes from merely hearing them. And this was precisely what Robert Schumann had considered to be the ideal accomplishment of any true musician. During 1966–7 I kept up an intense correspondence with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who lived in California. He was very kind to me, and our epistolary exchange was often avuncular in tone, to the extent that he used to sign off ‘Nonno Mario’,
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or Grandpa Mario. When he heard about my studies in composition he wanted to see what I had written, and I sent him a few manuscripts. These were academic exercises, but the envelope also contained a ‘free’ composition for solo guitar written in 1965 entitled Canzone notturna. The great composer sent back my efforts with his corrections, suggesting that I should focus on composition rather than concert performance. He believed that my foremost gifts were in creating music for the guitar, and indeed for other instruments. However, it took me a further 14 years to follow his advice, and anyway he died the following year, in 1968. So I abandoned my career as a performer in 1981 and decided to devote all my efforts to composition, at first alongside regular engagements as a teacher and specialist in the history of the guitar. There were various reasons for this decision, though the foremost was my pressing desire to give voice to the musical images that kept coming to mind, sometimes right in the middle of a recital. Like other performers before me, I felt that interpreting other people’s music was no longer what I really wanted to do. This involved a major change in direction, as well as lifestyle, which I happily embraced. From when I began composing in 1965 to 1973, I wrote several pieces for solo guitar, over and above the Canzone notturna mentioned above. These were Estrellas para Estarellas, Abreuana, Araucaria, Luceat and Trepidazione per Thebit, all of which faithfully reflect my orientation at the time: the desire to bring to the fore the highly distinctive value of the sound agglomerates of the guitar, the beauty of its sound and the enchantment of its colours, while maintaining the freedom to invest my musical thoughts with a well-defined, solid structure and a form that comes across almost as an improvisation. For several years I found this informal style particularly appealing because I felt it allowed me to bring out the special timbre of the instrument. Later, however, I began to realise that it was leading me down a cul-de-sac. So in 1973 I set out in a radically different direction with the fantasy Ocram and the suite Tenebrae factae sunt, which tended towards orderly structure achieved by a balanced use of metre and pulsating rhythms. Once I had abandoned dreamlike clouds of sound, this new approach gratified my desire to build up a well-founded edifice of sonority. I still did not feel ready for more important works, however, and since composition was not my core activity, I battened down the hatches and continued my career as a soloist. I should
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point out that all those pieces were originally written in response to the requests of guitarist friends, who urged me to compose – and whose experience and expertise obviously differed from those of ‘Nonno Mario’. The recipients of those early works were, in chronological order, Gabriel Estarellas, Sergio Abreu, Ernesto Bitetti, Ruggero Chiesa and Alice Artzt; to add to which, when I first met the then very young and remarkably gifted Marco de Santi, I was completely dazzled and decided to write a musical portrait of him which I entitled Ocram, which actually won an award at an international competition. The last composition of that period, Tenebrae factae sunt, embodied something of the sound atmosphere that was later described as tenebrismo (a term derived from art history referring to a pronounced use of chiaroscuro), an epithet that came to be equated with my creations for the guitar. Up to the change in direction of 1981, I devoted myself exclusively to my work as a concert guitarist, with the aim of drawing attention to the new repertoire for the guitar that many composers, not all of them European, were writing in direct contact with me. I wasn’t a performer who could electrify audiences with great shows of virtuoso skill. Instead I tried to engage their attention in listening. Although from a professional point of view I had nothing to complain about, in due course I began to feel that inspiration was waning. On a more modest level, I was a guitarist rather as Manuel de Falla, Shostakovich, Britten and Castelnuovo-Tedesco were pianists, and by the end of May 1981 I decided I had had enough, and that it was time to start my new career as a composer of guitar music. I understood that the time was ripe when I knew that I could conjure up the music in my mind, starting out from a simple visual observation, and when in my mind’s eye I could commit a score to paper while listening to a piece. Everything embodied the clear frameworks and formulas of guitar music. In my mind I had developed a virtual guitar that I understood in depth, hearing even the most unusual sounds and knowing exactly how the fingering should be without having to touch the real strings. I no longer needed to play to comprehend the full nature of a piece; and when I heard it in my mind I knew exactly how to write it as a score. I have composed all my music using this virtual guitar, even the chamber and orchestral works, with no need for tools beyond pen, paper and the computer that helps me make more fruitful and orderly use of time. Thus, since 1981, I have only played the guitar for my own pleasure, or on occasions to
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explain some detail to my students. I composed the first series (1–12) of Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza in a spate of creative activity during the second half of 1981. The entire collection, which comprises 60 pieces written between 1981 and 1988, has been the subject of various studies, the first and most exhaustive of which is by the guitarist and academic Gianni Nuti. I have little to add to this, except perhaps some extra snippet of information. For instance, the meaning of the title ‘virtuosity and transcendence’: in my view, being a virtuoso player does not mean astounding an audience with displays of brilliance but rather achieving such a high degree of skill and artistry that the act of playing itself dissolves all traces of the intrinsic labour and difficulty involved, such that the musical outcome appears to be the spontaneous result of ‘being a guitarist’. Proust summed up my concept of the ideal interpreter in the following terms: ‘He played so well that no one was aware of it any more: he was a window open on to music.’ The description rightly implies that skilful players who feel the need to show off their prowess to elicit applause do not belong to the same elevated category that I had in mind when composing for and with my ‘virtual guitar’. At the time I did not care whether such a player actually existed, and was not interested in the reaction that ‘real’ guitarists might have to my music. In fact, for years my Studies featured in the programmes of just a very few soloists, two or three guitarists who were particularly close to me. Foremost among these was Luigi Biscaldi, an exceptional guitarist and a very dear friend, to whom the first 12 Studies and several of the later ones were dedicated. So I was quite taken by surprise when, starting in the early 2000s, these works were increasingly included in the programmes of many other guitarists, and indeed were recorded in their entirety by Cristiano Porqueddu and, more recently, Angelo Marchese. Each of the Studies has a subtitle with the wording ‘Homage to…’, followed by the name of a painter, poet or composer. My aim was to reveal in music my predilections as a reader, observer or listener, and the feelings that such works aroused in me. I was not trying to imitate the styles and modes of these masters, which would have been a pointless exercise, but to express my perception of their art. This means that the Studies are not simply didactic works but also expressions of my inner world. Granted, I was certainly not the first
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composer to entrust a personal concept and feeling for music to studies for concert performance. The composition of the 60 Studies took seven years, ending towards the close of 1988. Between the third and fourth series – in the two-year period 1985–6 – I felt the need to take a break and work on more articulated forms, which resulted in the Sonata No.1 ‘Omaggio ad Antonio Fontanesi’ and the Sonata No.2 ‘Omaggio al pittore Ramón Nadal’. My intention was to evoke (rather than pedantically replicate) the classic Viennese sonata form using the idiomatic resources I had defined in the first three volumes of the Studies. As far as the aesthetic origins of the first two sonatas are concerned, it is clear that the visual impact of Fontanesi’s hazy 19th-century landscapes is far removed from the brilliant Mediterranean light of Majorca that permeates the paintings of Ramón Nadal, whose friendship I greatly enjoyed in those years. By the same token, in terms of sound my first two sonatas differ greatly in character and mood, despite the fact that they both derive from the same stylistic source. Once this cycle was completed, I was ready to sail towards wider seas, but found it hard to work out exactly how and in what form to create a dialogue between the guitar and other instruments, either in chamber music or in the concerto for solo guitar and orchestra. The existing models failed to convince me, yet for several years my own efforts to create a personal ‘sound’ and a stylistic profile beyond the sphere of solo guitar music came to nothing. The seven rich years devoted to the Studies and the first two sonatas were followed by seven years of creative penury in which I groped around in the dark, which probably accounts for the fact that the three works I did manage to compose were described as ‘tenebrist’: Variazioni sulla Follia (1989), Variazioni sulla Fortuna (1991) and Musica per l’angelo della Melancholìa (1991). Despite these difficulties, or perhaps on account of them, in the two cycles of variations I did actually manage to shape something that I still consider original: instead of adopting the entire body of the theme, in each variation I used separate fragments that I selected as though they were shards collected up after an explosion, connecting them up by means of musical elements that were extraneous to the theme itself but coherent with its individual parts. I was thus immersed in a world suspended between
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reality (the thematic elements) and trance (the alien elements), citing the basic subject only at the end or the beginning as a thematic base by which to gauge the ground I had covered as I distanced myself from my speculations. In this way I made it quite clear that my own world was totally extraneous to the reassuring, as I perceived them, temporal and physical spheres pertaining to subjects that were originally composed by Fernando Sor and John Dowland. Moreover, despite the fact that the five movements of the Musica per l’angelo della Melancholìa did not consist of variations as such, I tried to link them up by means of affinities that I have yet to understand, even though I am convinced that I have communicated them through the sounds of the music. I dedicated the work to the guitarist Vincenzo Torricella, one of the few former students of mine who later become a friend. Once I had finished the work, I realised that I could continue no further in the same direction, so I stopped and waited. The guitarist Luigi Attademo, who played the Variazioni sulla Follia extremely well, examined the three compositions in depth in the course of his studies for a degree in philosophy, writing a penetrating disquisition on my music. In my efforts to find a way out of the impasse, I sought a partial alternative to solo guitar works in composing the four concertos for groups of guitars. These essentially consisted of an exterior, and with hindsight I fear somewhat superficial, variant of the earlier works for solo guitar, whose musical idiom they largely shared. My long, ongoing endeavour to create a form of dialogue between the guitar (as a solo instrument or in a concerto) and other instruments suddenly achieved its goal in 1996, when I composed my first concerto for guitar and orchestra, inspired by Holy Week and duly entitled Leçons de Ténèbres. Since then I have never again suffered from composer’s block. Indeed, I have written many other concertos (16 of them so far), as well as a considerable amount of chamber music, from the Sonatine-Lied for guitar and one other instrument to the Octet. This latter piece came with relative ease, in marked contrast to the fruitless efforts of the seven-year period from 1989 to 1995. Having widened my creative horizons, I was able to leave my earlier works behind me, only feeling the need to compose for solo guitar again a few years later, when I was sure that I did not risk returning to bygone habits. When in 2000 my American friend Stanley Yates invited me to write something short for the guitar, I
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realised that my musical imagination and the way I composed had changed: Winterzeit speaks for my return to an intimate mood of composition involving the six strings. In writing that meditation on a theme by Robert Schumann I understood that I had changed, and that my experience as a composer for the guitar was likely to undergo further developments. In 2001 I attended the ceremony organised by the Andalusian city of Linares in honour of Andrés Segovia, whose mortal remains were to be moved to the crypt of the Museum founded in his birthplace from the cemetery in Madrid where he was buried in 1987. At the event, my friend the guitarist Frédéric Zigante urged me to compose a piece in keeping with Segovia’s stylistic tastes. The following year (2002) I thus wrote Colloquio con Andrés Segovia, a piece whose harmony and form recall the Italian composers Segovia included in his repertoire (from Roncalli, Frescobaldi and Scarlatti to Castelnuovo-Tedesco), plus the odd allusion to certain of Ravel’s works in the ‘early’ style. This piece, along with the Sonata No.2 and Study No.4, is now the most frequently performed of my compositions for guitar. Certain ‘critics’ are surprised to discover than I can write diatonic modal music as well as practically atonal chromatic music. I would be surprised if this were not the case: a composer can perfectly well turn to different musical idioms while remaining coherent with his own style and identity; and while eclecticism at all costs is not an end in itself, as often as not those who stick to a single style do so from inertia or lack of courage and mental flexibility. During the three-year span 2002–04 I returned to writing for solo guitar: the concertos and chamber music had opened new doors; and, with respect to the Studies, my new compositions for guitar were on the one hand simpler and on the other enriched with a highly developed form of counterpoint that was little more than latent in the earlier works. In those three years I wrote the Sonatine des fleurs et des oiseaux, the Tríptico de las visiones (2002), the two sonatinas Catskill Pond and La casa del faro (2003), and in 2004, which was particularly fruitful, the Sonata mediterranea and the Sonata del Guadalquivir, Annunciazione, Ikonostas and Memory of Antinous: a rich harvest indeed! While I conceived the Sonatine des fleurs et des oiseaux in relation to the style of my dear guitarist friend Lorenzo Micheli, to whom the piece was dedicated, the work also reveals my undying admiration for the art of two wonderful composers: Maurice Ravel and Olivier
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Messiaen. The French title also indirectly reveals my constant delight in two masterpieces that cohabit my personal musical sanctuary, though they occupy different chapters of the history of music: Ravel’s Sonatine for piano and Messiaen’s Réveil des oiseaux. Those inclined to measure music by its difficulty insinuate that I went over the top with this latter piece, though my perception is that the deliberate transparency and brilliance of sound give the work its immediacy. Granted, it may not be easy, but it is certainly not tenebrist, despite the fact that the long second movement is deeply meditative, to the extent that I consider it one of the most complete compositions in my entire output. The Tríptico de las visiones was written in honour of my friendship with the great Spanish guitarist Gabriel Estarellas. In fact every stage of my oeuvre contains a piece dedicated to him: Estrellas para Estarellas in my youth, Sonata No.2 during the 1980s, the Tríptico, plus another piece written very recently. Once again in this case the compositions are ‘pictorial’, in that they derive from my observation of the works of three great Spanish artists of the 19th century, little known in Europe but to my mind enormously inspired. The titles in Castilian perfectly describe the nature of the works: 1) ‘Lejano y legendario’ (La gruta de los Profetas by Antonio Muñoz Degrain; 2) ‘Místico y profundo’ (El Convento de Santo Espíritu de Segovia by Aureliano de Beruete); 3) ‘Tibio y luminoso’ (Almendros en flor by Darío de Regoyos). Catskill Pond and La casa del faro are my two ‘American sonatinas’. Inspired by an image I saw on the internet captured by New York photographer John Wasak, the former is dedicated to the guitarist David Leisner, who is also a New Yorker. Although it is not specified in the subtitle, the latter is a homage to the art of the great painter Edward Hopper, whom I admire enormously and who portrayed some of the solitary lighthouses of the American coastline. The work is dedicated to the guitarist Mark Delpriora, a colleague of Leisner’s on the staff at the Manhattan School of Music. Both musicians have long been close friends of mine. The Sonata Mediterranea came about as a homage to Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, though only the first movement, ‘Cipressi’, was written with his music in mind. The second movement is a lullaby that conjures up the hush of an empty night-time street in Naples, and the music
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is preceded by an inscription that cites verses from a poem by Salvatore Di Giacomo Nu pianefforte ’e notte). The finale (‘Pini sul mare’) recalls the airy paintings of Giuseppe Casciaro, whose pastels skilfully capture the coastline swept by sea breezes around Naples. The composition embodies both of my styles, the diatonic modal idiom and the chromatic, atonal approach, thereby revealing their intrinsic coherence and extrinsic cohesion. The Sonata del Guadalquivir, on the other hand, is completely diatonic. It evokes the Spain of myth and poetry, and thus relates to memory rather than to reality. Entitled ‘Memorias’, ‘Leyendas’ and ‘Lejanías’, the three movements refer to the meta-historical world of great Spanish literature with its power to enchant by telling stories. In this case, the narration is entrusted to notes rather than to words. The second movement is a madrigalstyle rendering of the early folk song ‘Tres morillas’, while the motif of the ritornello in the final rondo is somewhat reminiscent of the final theme of Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España, which in its turn recalls the sombre ‘Zorongo gitano’ beloved of Federico García Lorca. Mine is not so much a real citation as a way of greeting briefly the great man’s shadow. Some guitarists like to add the Colloquio con Andrés Segovia to the three movements of the Sonata del Guadalquivir, placing it as a sort of intermezzo between the second and third movements, just before the finale. Given the evident stylistic affinity of these pieces, I cannot object to this. Indeed, I believe is it only right that players should enjoy creative freedom of this sort. Annunciazione (Omaggio al Beato Angelico) is a short piece in diatonic-modal style that I composed in response to a suggestion from the Austrian writer Eva Jaksch, who is also a good guitarist. Jaksch came up with the idea that I should write a work based on the Renaissance song ‘L’homme armé’, and I simply used the melody as a cantus firmus threevoice guitar polyphony, inventing lines whose humble simplicity could express my feelings of deep astonishment at and admiration for Fra Angelico’s altarpiece The Annunciation. Great composers of polyphony such as Dufay and Ockeghem had built towering edifices of polyphony on that song, and I felt that with the guitar I had to proceed in the opposite direction. Ikonostas marked the start of my acquaintance with the Russian guitar tuned to an open
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G. This piece also derived from a literary source: a book I was reading in Italian, The Royal Doors, which was my first contact with the great Russian philosopher and scientist Pavel Florensky. The form of the composition evokes the interiors of Orthodox churches in Russia, divided into two parts by the iconostasis or templon, a sort of icon screen that separates the sanctuary, where priests officiate, from the nave and the congregation. In fact the first half of the work, structured like a passacaglia in G minor, is intended to recall the intimate, slightly grieving atmosphere of the people’s prayers, with their due touch of imagination; a modal modulation then lightens the mood and the passacaglia develops into a solemn song of worship, elevated in the sanctuary by the celebrants of Mass; the piece ends with a sort of Gloria. Although I adopted the Russian tuning, I chose to use a six-string guitar. Later I was to write the Concerto di Novgorod (2006) for guitar and orchestra and the sonata for solo guitar Winter Tales (2008) for the seven-string Russian guitar. My efforts with this instrument were warmly encouraged by my friends Matanya Ophee, Oleg Timofeyev and Stanley Yates. In 2004 I completed another polyphonic piece that was also the fruit of an idea expressed by Eva Jaksch. Here again it is based on a monody, this time of very early origin, the ‘Canto di Seikilos’, the notes of which are engraved on a Greek funerary stele found in Turkey in the 19th century but which dates back to the period between 200BC and 100AD. The monod is developed and embellished in the wake of the legend of Antinous, the Bithynian youth beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who deified him following the boy’s premature death. Marguerite Yourcenar narrated these lives in her wonderful book Memoirs of Hadrian, and the tale is implied in the musical development. This is shaped like a parabola, with its highest point in the centre, which then slowly declines and gently dissolves into nothingness, like the brief life of Antinous. That fruitful period stretched into 2005, when I finished the last composition for solo guitar based on given thematic elements. My London-based colleague and friend John W. Duarte, who had composed a great deal of music for the guitar, had died the previous year, and the American guitarist David Norton wanted to celebrate his memory by commissioning me to write a piece in his honour. Norton generously allowed me to publish the work as soon
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as it was ready. It was based on the melody of the Scottish folk song ‘Barbara Allen’, which allowed me to write a counterpoint series and a short development, while avoiding anything that contrasted with the gently melancholic mood of the song. I called the piece A Quiet Song, a title that recalled a beautiful composition for voice and guitar by Duarte himself: Five Quiet Songs. Next came another span of time in which works for solo guitar were not on the agenda. Instead I composed chamber music and concertos, and took time off, though not to go on holiday. In 2007 I happened to hear an excellent young Venetian guitarist, Alberto Mesirca, play Annunciazione and Ikonostas. His performances made me want to return to music for solo guitar, and I wrote a sonatina entitled Cantico di Gubbio (the diminutive was perhaps inappropriate). Although I have never been tempted to write descriptive music – in fact I fail to understand how one could want to – I have often linked my compositions to a particular place, though certainly not with the aim of celebrating its attractions. This particular piece is mystical in character, with relatively subdued polyphony. Mesirca immediately adopted it, and it suited him perfectly. Both of us appreciate Franciscan spirituality, and I am very fond of Gubbio… The following year, apart from the Sonata for seven-string Russian guitar, I also composed the Sonata di Lagonegro. From the early 1980s through to the beginning of 2000, I used to spend some of the summer in the town of Lagonegro in Lucania (in the southern Italian region of Basilicata) to teach at the International Guitar Festival, which gave me the opportunity to get to know the people and the surrounding area. It was there that I first taught the then very young Luigi Attademo, and made friends with the painter Mauro Masi, whose works celebrate the local landscape in terms that are anything but naive. The Sonata was written to commemorate those times and places: I don’t know how music manages to connect with our memories to become sound images but I do know that this is what it does; indeed, I believe that music for the guitar is the most effective way of bringing about the marvel of evocation. In 2011 my friend Filippo Michelangeli, the guitarist, journalist and publisher, suggested that I should accompany the Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza with a series of pieces aimed at helping students approach the music of the 1900s. The fruit of this was the
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collection of 20 Studi facili in which I tried to return to the beginner’s approach, making sure that musical values were always in the foreground and without getting bogged down in mechanical exercises. It was a way of conjugating my work in a manner that was completely coherent with my philosophy and style. The following year, I composed the collection of Seven Preludes, which was a sort of natural development of the Studi facili. One of the most gifted students I have ever had the good fortune to teach was Christian Saggese. He has become a virtuoso player who always seems to be having fun when he plays the guitar, no matter how demanding the piece may be. I imagine that my ‘tenebrist’ music was poles apart from his world, and that he was unlikely to decipher, let alone enjoy, much of what I wrote. Our exchanges always involved a certain amount of reciprocal teasing, and in 2013 we came up with the idea that I should provide him with a real challenge by composing something that he would like, yet also find practically inaccessible from the virtuoso point of view. I decided to make the piece seem innocuous by adopting the theme of the French folk song made famous by Mozart: ‘Ah, vous dirais-je, Maman’. Stated without harmonisation, as though it should be played with one finger, the melody then gives rise to a series of ornamental variations (except the harmonic variation and the one at the end). In so doing I practically transcended my own ‘virtual guitar’, thinking of the ‘parody of [Mozartian] innocence’ that Thomas Mann conjured up in Doctor Faustus. Saggese not only digested the whole idea without a problem and had a great time playing the piece, but he also wanted another. So the second time round I stopped trying to challenge him and put my all into a theme from The Magic Flute that Fernando Sor had already embellished with variations. The outcome elicited no compunction on the part of my one-time student but it did bring about serious interpretation as opposed to jocularity. The last piece I wrote in 2013 is a diptych entitled Due ritratti italiani, included in this recording. Taking two masterpieces of Italian painting as a cue (Giorgione’s Boy with an Arrow and Titian’s A Knight of Malta), I decided to create a portrait in music of two of my friends: the guitarist Alberto Mesirca (who comes from Giorgione’s hometown) and the film director Marco Tullio Giordana, who loves the guitar and lutherie. The two pieces reflect the different characters of the two artists as I see them now, and are detailed life-size paintings
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rather than rapid sketches. I believe the one conjures up the dashing, smiling youthfulness of Alberto but also his precocious, thoughtful wisdom; while the other captures Marco Tullio’s depth and slightly solemn perspicacity, along with his brilliant imagination – a combination that has blessed us with films such as The Best of Youth. My work has nothing in common with the music born of post-Webernian ideology or the sort of music for entertainment that occupies a great deal of the current guitar repertoire. But it does speak for who I am, intus et in cute: it is everything that I aspired to as I wrote it, and I entrust it to performers and audiences with no other request than that is played and listened to with an open mind, free of prejudice. 훿 Angelo Gilardino, February 2015 Translation: Kate Singleton
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Cristiano Porqueddu began studying classical guitar at the age of seven, under the tutelage of his father. After graduating from the Conservatoire, he attended courses and masterclasses all over Europe, including a three-year Masters course under Angelo Gilardino at the ‘Lorenzo Perosi’ Academy in Biella, where he received his diploma with excellence. He has been critically acclaimed as ‘a point of reference for the new generation of guitarists’ and he gives concerts around Europe and USA. In 2002 he made his first recording, and since 2008 his recordings have been released by Brilliant Classics to great success all over the world, making him one of the most widely known guitarists for his interpretations of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. Over the course of 12 years, Porqueddu completed 16 recording projects at the highest artistic level, including the albums Trascendentia (Gilardino: Complete Studies for Solo Guitar) (Brilliant Classics 8886), Novecento Guitar Preludes (Gilardino: Concertos for Guitar and Orchestra) (9292) and Agustín Barrios Mangoré’s Complete Music for Solo Guitar (9204) among others. He has been working on the titanic project of recording Gilardino’s complete music for solo guitar since June 2012. His recording career is acclaimed worldwide for its consistent high quality and for featuring original and almost unknown guitar repertoire. In 2010, Porqueddu was awarded first prize in the Orphée Composition Competition in Ohio. He lives in Sardinia where as well as teaching he acts as artistic director of the Agustín Barrios International Guitar Competition and the Associazione Musicare. He also gives his own courses in Italy and abroad. www.cristianoporqueddu.com
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