ISSUED: 9 May 2014
MEDIA CONTACT: Valerie Owens
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — The Shepherd University Department of Music will premiere the Summer Guitar Festival July 17-20.
The four-day festival will include master classes, one-on-one guitar lessons, guitar ensemble rehearsals, and concerts by guest artists William Feasley, adjunct faculty member, and Jose Manuel Lezcano.
Feasley is the director of Shepherd’s guitar program and was the first guitarist awarded the Peabody Conservatory’s coveted Artist Diploma. He has since received numerous prizes and awards including a gold medal in the 1987 PanHellenic Guitar Competition in Athens and the 1990 and 1995 Baltimore Chamber Music Awards and a 1996 Governor’s Citation for outstanding achievements in the arts in Maryland. He played for Andres Segovia at the master’s historic last class at the University of Southern California in 1986 and was later featured on the CBS special “Eulogy of Segovia.”
Feasley has also appeared in the Ohrid Spoleto Festival in Macedonia and at venues including St. Martin in the Fields in London, the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, theWashington National Cathedral, and the Yale University Centre for British Art. He has toured with the Russian Chamber Orchestra, Music Viva, in the former Yugoslavia, with the Moyzes String Quartet in Slovakia, and performed live on ABC International Radio in Australia, with New York’s Bacchanalia Ensemble under the direction of Nina Beilina and Washington’s 20th Century Consort.
Lezcano is a Cuban-born guitarist, composer, educator, and folklorist who has captivated audiences on four continents. His programs of traditional and South American guitar repertory, and his own solo, concerto, and chamber works have taken him from Carnegie Recital Hall to major venues and festivals in the U.S., Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, China, Spain, Greece, Germany, and the Czech Republic appearing as recitalist, collaborative musician, concerto soloist, and composer.
Lezcano has earned the numerous professional recognitions, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship, the NHMTA composer of the year twice, and a Fulbirght Award to Ecuador where he performed as orchestral soloist and researched indigenous guitar traditions. He premiered his second guitar concerto, “Concierto Cubanero” in 2011 in New York and in Quito, Ecuador. In 2012 Lezcano’s “Tango-Overture” for strings, conducted by Max Lifchitz, received its debut recording on the North-South label as Cross-Currents.
The festival is concurrent with the Contemporary American Theater Festival. Nightly concerts by guest artists at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Shepherdstown are the festival centerpiece with a participants concert Saturday night and are free and open to the public. The festival is open to anyone interested in studying classical guitar. The fee for junior guitarists grades 6-8 is $120 and adult guitarists grades 9-12 and adults is $220.
For more information and to register, go to www.shepherd.edu/musicweb/documents/GuitarFestivalBrochure2014.pdf or contact Dr. Robert Tudor at 304-876-5237.
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