© Keitaro Yoshioka
One of Eliot Fisk's particular passions is broadening the conventional audience of "serious music." In Salzburg, where he has been a guitar teacher at the Mozarteum University since 1989, he founded "Guitar and Friends," an initiative that seeks simultaneously to give young musicians experience in "outreach" activities and to bring classical music in all possible genres to a wider audience in atypical performance venues.
Eliot Fisk graduated from Yale University, where he received his BA (summa cum laude) and MM and studied with Ralph Kirkpatrick. He was then commissioned to found the guitar department at the age of only 22. In 1974 he was introduced to his beloved role model Andres Segovia, received private lessons for several years and was also enthusiastically supported by the great master. In 1981 Segovia wrote about him, "He belongs in the first rank of our artistic world." Eliot Fisk has played in recitals in most of the world's major concert halls, as a soloist with orchestra and together with chamber music colleagues such as Paula Robison (flute), Lucero Tena (castanets) or the Julliard String Quartet. His innate curiosity led him to tours around the world in more unusual combinations, e.g. B. with Joe Pass (jazz guitar), Burhan Oecal (Turkish music) and Paco Pena (flamenco guitar). Several important composers wrote new works especially for him, including Luciano Berio (sequence XI and Chemin V) , George Rochberg (Muse of Fire, American Bouquet, Eden Out of Time and out of Space), Robert Beaser (Mountain Songs, Notes on a Southern Sky), Xavier Montsalvatge (3 Fados), Kurt Schwertsik (A Little Requiem fuer solo guitar) and Nicholas Maw (Music of Memory).
Eliot Fisk is known worldwide for his daring arrangements. Among other things, he (for the first time) arranged and recorded all 24 Capricci from Paganini's Op.1, Bach's 6 sonatas and partitas for solo violin, numerous harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, and all of Vivaldi's works for plucked instruments for guitar. Many of his recordings have won awards and entered the American Billboard Charts as bestsellers. In 1996 he was invited by the Spanish royal family to play for President Bill Clinton and his family at the Palacio de los Cordova in the Spanish city of Granada. In 2006 he received personally the most important order of the Spanish state, the Cruz De Isabela La Catolica (for services in the field of Spanish music) from the Spanish king. That same year he created the Boston Guitar Fest. This festival places the guitar in a global, cross-border context.
Eliot Fisk is known worldwide for his daring arrangements. Among other things, he (for the first time) arranged and recorded all 24 Capricci from Paganini's Op.1, Bach's 6 sonatas and partitas for solo violin, numerous harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, and all of Vivaldi's works for plucked instruments for guitar. Many of his recordings have won awards and entered the American Billboard Charts as bestsellers. In 1996 he was invited by the Spanish royal family to play for President Bill Clinton and his family at the Palacio de los Cordova in the Spanish city of Granada. In 2006 he received personally the most important order of the Spanish state, the Cruz De Isabela La Catolica (for services in the field of Spanish music) from the Spanish king. That same year he created the Boston Guitar Fest. This festival places the guitar in a global, cross-border context.