Career and Evaluation
An innovative performer, Fisk is known for an adventurous repertoire and willingness to take art music into unusual venues, including schools, senior centers and even prisons. He has received critical acclaim in recital, as a soloist with major orchestras and in a wide variety of chamber music combinations. In 1996 he appeared in a command performance in the Palacio de los Cordova in Granada, Spain, for then U.S. President Bill Clinton and King Juan Carlos and their families.
Fisk is founder and director of Boston Guitar Fest, an annual event held in the month of June at the New England Conservatory. This workshop is dedicated to exploring new technical and musical possibilities of the guitar within an international cultural context. He has expanded the repertoire for the guitar through transcriptions of works by Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Paganini, and others, as well as through commissions from various composers including Luciano Berio, Leonardo Balada, Robert Beaser, Wiliam Bolcom, Xavier Montsalvatge, Nicholas Maw, George Rochberg and Kurt Schwertsik. His transcriptions and editions are published by Universal, Presser, Ricordi and Guitar Solo Publications.
His recordings for the Musical Heritage Society, DGG, Arabesque, and EMI have been much praised and even entered the Billboard charts as bestsellers. Many of these recordings include repertoire never before performed on the guitar such as his reading of the 24 solo violin Capricci, Op. 1 of Paganini, and his recordings of contemporary works by Berio and Rochberg or his recording with Paula Robison of Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs, which was nominated for a Grammy.
Fisk's efforts in unconventional musical territory have included collaborations with chanteuse Ute Lemper, Turkish music expert Burhan Öçal, jazz musician Joe Pass, and master of castanets Lucero Tena. Upcoming projects include the premiere of a new quintet for guitar and strings by Leonardo Balada with the Miro String Quartet, the premiere of a new guitar concerto by Robert Beaser, and a nationwide tour of the US resulting in a duo CD with flamenco guitarist Paco Peña.
Read more about this topic: Eliot Fisk
Famous quotes containing the words career and, career and/or evaluation:
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)