Thursday, March 30, 2000

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- World-acclaimed classical guitarist Michael Lorimer, will give a performance at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 11, in Kenan Auditorium on the UNCW campus. The performance is being sponsored by the UNCW Department of Music and The Watson School of Education. In addition he will give a lecture at 2 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, also in Kenan Auditorium. The central theme of the concert is "Masters of the Fretboard" -- music by great guitarist/composers.

A former UNCW Distinguished Visiting Professor, Lorimer was a favorite protege of Andrés Segovia, who caught the attention of American audiences in the early 1970s through tours arranged by the great impresario Sol Hurok. His popularity soon extended beyond the shores of America. The first American guitarist invited to perform in the USSR, he concertized there in 1975 and in 1977 on two extensive tours. He has appeared in Israel, Cuba, throughout Europe, on most major North American recital series, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Orpheus, with Kronos, and with the orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Louisville, New Orleans and San Francisco.

At the same time that Lorimer is an enthusiastic exponent of new music and of traditional classics, he is also the first world-class guitarist to regularly feature the baroque guitar in recital. Twenty years ago, long before the present vogue in original instruments, he was a pioneer bringing attention to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessor to the modern instrument. By the mid-1970s one London critic said, "If Lorimer is not the best baroque guitarist in the world at present the competition has still to present itself." In 1987 Lorimer brought to light a milestone of the guitar repertoire, the best surviving collection for any instrument of early eighteenth-century Spanish dance music, when he published a detailed study and facsimile of the SaldÌvar Codex N 4, a large, hitherto anonymous manuscript from a private collection in Mexico, and identified it as the companion volume to the British Library manuscript "Passacalles y Obras" (1732), a legacy of the guitar teacher to the Queen of Spain Santiago de Murcia, the last great Spanish guitarist of the baroque period.

In addition to concerts, Lorimer gives master classes at North American universities and conservatories from coast to coast. He is an engaging spokesman in demand for experimental programs in arts presentation.

Lorimer has written for the Guitar Review and for six years contributed a widely-praised monthly column to Guitar Player. He edits the Michael Lorimer Edition (distributed by Mel Bay) which now numbers over twenty volumes and is comprised of the "Classics Series" which features his transcriptions, and the "Composers Series," a special forum for new music. He is the star of the television special "The Artistry of Michael Lorimer" which has appeared nationwide on the USA Public Broadcasting System (PBS). His most recently released recording Remembranza (distributed by Windham Hill/Dancing Cat) is a tribute to Andrés Segovia.

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the Kenan Auditorium Box Office. For additional information call the UNCW Music Department at 962-3390.