Angelo Gilardino (16 November 1941 – 14 January 2022) was an Italian composer, guitarist, and musicologist.
Life and career
Gilardino was born in Vercelli, Italy, on 16 November 1941.
During his concert career, from 1958 to 1981, he premiered hundreds of new works for the guitar. Among his premieres was John Duarte's Mutations on Dies Irae in 1974. He taught at the Liceo Musicale G. B. Viotti in Vercelli from 1965 to 1981, and held a professorship at the Antonio Vivaldi Conservatory in Alessandria from 1981 to 2004. The Conservatory awarded him the Marengo Music Prize in 1998.
Gilardino has composed much music for solo guitar, as well as chamber music and concertos. His solo works include five volumes of Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza (1981-1988), two numbered sonatas (1985, 1986) as well as several titled sonatas and sonatinas, two sets of variations (1989, 1991), and Ikonostas for a guitar tuned in G (2004).
The Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza represent one of the most significant contributions to the guitar repertoire in the 20th century. The title places the collection in the tradition of the Transcendental Etudes by Franz Liszt. Numbers 1 through 48 have dedications that play an important role in identifying influences and traditions that are important to the composer and help provide a context in which to interpret the individual etudes. These have been recorded by the guitarist Cristiano Porqueddu for Brilliant Classics.
He has also written four works for guitar with guitar orchestra, seven concertos for guitar, some in combination with other instruments (including mandolin and accordion), and several duets (for guitar with bassoon, cello, violin and vibraphone).
From 1967 to 2006, Gilardino supervised the publication of hundreds of new guitar works by Edizioni Musicali Bèrben. He has also discovered the Variazioni by Ottorino Respighi and several works written for the guitarist Andrés Segovia by Cyril Scott, Pierre de Bréville, Lennox Berkeley and many others. He was artistic director of the Andrés Segovia Foundation of Linares from 1997 to 2005.
In 2009 the Guitar Foundation of America conferred upon him the prestigious Artistic Achievement Award which is reserved for performers, composers, pedagogues, and scholars who have made monumental contributions to the development of the art and life of the classical guitar.
Gilardino died on 14 January 2022, at the age of 80.
Quotes
"I am not a good interpreter of my own music - I never played it and I avoid giving lessons with my music on the stand. " - rec.music.classical.guitar (23 January 2003) "I have no connection with my pieces, except when I am composing them. Since then, especially when published, they belong to everybody, and I am no longer especially fond of a piece or of another. I feel insignificant and unimportant in respect of the music I write. I have to add - to be quite honest - that when teaching I do not like to deal with my own music. [...] when it happens I have to teach a piece of my own, I feel rather uncertain about what to say." - Interview with Angelo Gilardino "Actually, since 1981 to March of this year I was active as a professor in a conservatory and - even without giving concerts - I followed learning a lot about guitar, due mainly to the excellence of students who have cooperated with me. But, I confirm, you are right, I am no technician at all - my work with players has developed in the area of interpretation. I have taught people who could play much better than I did even when I was a concert player." rec.music.classical.guitar (31 August 2004)