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Alexandra Whittingham & Roland Dyens

Dyens: Lettre Encore

Alexandra Whittingham & Roland Dyens

1 SONG • 1 MINUTE • JUL 19 2024

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Dyens: Lettre Encore
01:35
℗© 2024 Universal Music Operations Limited

Artist bios

Alexandra Whittingham is a notable guitarist, giving concerts in many countries and earning a recording contract by her early twenties. Her debut album, My European Journey, featured unusual repertory.

Whittingham was born May 15, 1997, and is a native of Manchester, England. Her father was an amateur guitarist, and in emulation of him, she took up the guitar at age five. She had lessons at her local primary school, progressed rapidly, and entered Manchester's Chetham's School of Music at 11. There, Whittingham played in many kinds of ensembles and toured Germany and the Czech Republic as a member of the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra, but she gravitated toward classical guitar after hearing a teacher play Spanish guitar music. Whittingham attended the Royal Academy of Music in London, graduating with first class honors, winning the school's Timothy Gilson Guitar Prize, and also earning a Licentiate degree. She has continued on for a master's degree at the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, several competition wins propelled her performing career forward; she won the inaugural Edinburgh Guitar Competition in 2013, was named Gregynog Young Guitarist of the Year in 2015, and was a finalist at Denmark's Aalborg International Guitar Competition. Whittingham has given recitals at such venues as County Hall and the Milton Court Concert Hall in London, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. She has appeared at venues and festivals in continental Europe and the U.S., including the Festival Le Temps des Guitares in France, and she has performed concertos with the Dorset Chamber Orchestra and the Gorton Philharmonic Orchestra. Whittingham's online videos have garnered more than 26 million views as of this writing.

Signed to the Delphian label, Whittingham conceived her debut album during Britain's COVID lockdown and released My European Journey in May of 2021. The album featured atypical repertory for a debut release, including 19th century pieces from around Europe. ~ James Manheim

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Roland Dyens ws recognized both as one of the most prominent classical guitarists of his generation and as an important composer and arranger of music for the guitar. He was distinguished from most of his rivals by his deft improvisatory skills. His music is quite accessible, often employing folk sources and jazz styles woven into a colorful fabric always suited to the unique sounds of the guitar. Dyens' 1985 piece Tango en Skaï is probably his most popular, though Valse en skaï and Libra Sonatine have also enjoyed currency. Virtually all of Dyens' works involve the guitar: some are solo pieces, while others use several guitars or a combination of instruments (guitar and piano; guitar and string quartet, etc.), while others still use orchestral accompaniment. As a performer, Dyens' repertory was broad, taking in standards by Rodrigo, Sor, Moreno Torroba, Mangoré, and Brouwer. He also performed a number of his own transcriptions of works by Chopin, Villa-Lobos, Satie, and Weiss, as well as compositions he fashioned after themes by Mozart, Rossini, Brouwer, and others. Dyens recorded for Gha Records, Atma Classique, Naïve-Auvidis, and L'empreinte Digitale.

Roland Dyens was born in Tunisia on October 19, 1955. He began studying guitar at nine and at 13 became a student of guitar virtuoso Alberto Ponce. At the Paris-based Concert de l'Ecole Normale de Musique, Dyens studied both guitar and composition, the latter with Désiré Dondeyne.

Dyens won prizes at several guitar competitions, including at the 1979 International Competition Città di Alessandria in Italy. The aforementioned Tango en Skaï helped establish his reputation as a composer in the 1980s, but at the same time his performance skills were broadly celebrated: in 1988 the French music magazine Guitarist included him on the list of the world's top 100 living guitarists.

Dyens received a Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles-Cros for one of his earliest recordings, the Villa-Lobos Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra, issued on the Naïve-Auvidis. Throughout the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s Dyens garnered wide acclaim for his concert tours across the globe and for his recordings. In 2007 he composed on commission a performance piece for the prestigious competition of the Guitar Foundation of America, and the following year he was honored at the Città di Fiuggi Guitar Festival in Rome. Among Dyens' recordings is the 2008 release on Gha of pieces by Rodrigo, Brouwer, Buxtehude, and others.

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