Guitar Greats: Sharon Isbin @ Akin

Acclaimed for her extraordinary lyricism, technique, and versatility, multiple Grammy Award winning Sharon Isbin was named the 2020 Musical America Worldwide Instrumentalist of the Year, the first guitarist ever to receive the converted honor in its 59 year award history. Soloist with over 200 orchestras, Isbin has performed in the world’s finest halls. Winner of the Toronto, Madrid and Munich ARD Competitions, Germany’s Echo Klassik and Guitar Player’s Best Classical Guitarist awards, she performed in Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed, at Ground Zero for the first internationally televised 9/11 memorial, the White House by invitation of President Obama, and as the only classical artist in the 2010 Grammy Awards. The Documentary Sharon Isbin: Troubadour, seen by millions on over 200 PBS stations across the U.S. and abroad, won the ASCAP Television Broadcast Award. Recent highlights include a commission for her by Carneguie Hall, a 21-city Guitar Passions tour with jazz greats Stanely Jordan and Romeo Lubambo, sold-out concerts at the Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center, and her most recent Carnegie Hall appearances included collaborations with Sting and in recital with Isabel Leonard. 

Isbin’s catalogue of over 30 albums, from Baroque, Spanish/Latin and 20th Century to crossover and jazz-fusion have sold nearly a million copies and reflect her remarkable versatility. Her two latest releases in May 2020 of world premiere recordings of music composed for her are Affinity featuring Chris Brubeck’s acclaimed concerto for guitar and orchestra, and Strings for Peace, with India’s legendary Amjad Amli Khan in a program of ragas for guitar, sarod and tabla. Her 2019 release with the Pacifica Quatart, Souvenirs of Spain and Italy, debuted at #1 on Amazon and #2 on Billboard, and her Grammy-winning Journey to the New World with guests Joan Baez and Mark O’Conner spent 63 consecutive weeks on top Billboard charts. Isbin’s Dreams of a World earned her a Grammy for Best Instrumentalist Soloist, making her the first classical guitarist to receive the award in 28 years. Her recording of concerti composed for her by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun was honored with a Grammy, and her Rodrigo Aranjuez with the New York Philharmonic, their only recording with guitar, received a Latin Grammy nomination. Author of the Classical Guitar Answer Book, Isbin has premiered over 80 works written for her by some of the world’s finest composers, and directs the guitar departments at the Aspen Music Festival and The Juilliard School, which she created in 1989. 

Born in Minneapolis, Sharon Isbin began her guitar studies at age nine in Italy, and later studied with Andrès Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, and for ten years with noted Bach scholar and keyboardist Rosalyn Tureck, with whom she collaborated on landmark editions & recordings of the Bach lute suites for guitar (Warner Classics/G. Schirmer). She received a B.A. cum laude from Yale University and a Master of Music from the Yale School of Music. She authored the Classical Guitar Answer Book, and is Director of guitar departments at the Aspen Music Festival and The Juilliard School (which she created in l989 becoming the first and only guitar instructor in the institution’s 100-year history).