(ENGLEWOOD, NJ) -- Bergen Performing Arts Center presents Sharon Isbin on Sunday, February 26 at 3:00pm. Acclaimed as “the pre-eminent guitarist of our time,” multiple Grammy Award winner Sharon Isbin has appeared as soloist with over 170 orchestras and given sold-out performances in the world’s finest halls. The show is sponsored by The Frank & Lydia Bergen Foundation. Tickets range from $29 to $49.
Winner of the Toronto, Madrid and Munich Competitions, Germany’s Echo Klassik and Guitar Player’s "Best Classical Guitarist" award, she has been artistic director/soloist of festivals she created for Carnegie Hall and NPR. A frequent guest on All Things Considered and A Prairie Home Companion, she has been on the cover of over 45 magazines, profiled on CBS Sunday, and featured soloist in Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. On September 11, 2002, Ms. Isbin performed at Ground Zero for the internationally televised memorial, at the White House by invitation of President Obama in 2009, and was the only classical artist to perform in the 2010 Grammy Awards. Her PBS television performances include the Billy Joel Gershwin Prize, Tavis Smiley, and the acclaimed one-hour documentary Sharon Isbin: Troubadour seen by millions on over 200 PBS stations across the US and winner of the 2015 ASCAP Television Broadcast Award.
Ms. Isbin’s catalogue of over 25 recordings—from Baroque, Spanish/Latin and 20th Century to crossover and jazz-fusion - reflects remarkable versatility. Her latest releases, Sharon Isbin: 5 Classic Albums and Sharon Isbin & Friends: Guitar Passions with rock/jazz guests Steve Vai, Steve Morse, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Stanley Jordan and Romero Lubambo, have been #1 bestsellers on Amazon.com. Her 2010 Grammy-winning Journey to the New World with guests Joan Baez and Mark O’Connor spent 63 consecutive weeks on top Billboard charts. She received a Latin Grammy nomination for her Rodrigo Aranjuez disc of concertos with the New York Philharmonic, their only guitar recording. Sharon Isbin has been acclaimed for expanding the guitar repertoire with some of the finest new works of the century. She has commissioned and premiered more concerti than any other guitarist, as well as numerous solo and chamber works. Her American Landscapes is the first-ever recording of American guitar concerti and features works written for her by John Corigliano, Joseph Schwantner and Lukas Foss.
As a chamber musician, Ms. Isbin has performed with the Emerson String Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guitar Summit tour with jazz greats Herb Ellis, Stanley Jordan and Michael Hedges, trio recordings with Larry Coryell and Laurindo Almeida, and duo recordings with Carlos Barbosa-Lima. She collaborated with Antonio Carlos Jobim, and has shared the stage with luminaries from Sting to Aretha Franklin.
Recent highlights include premieres of a concerto written for her by Chris Brubeck and a co-commission by Carnegie Hall for their 125th anniversary and Chicago’s Harris Theater, a 21-city Guitar Passions tour, and tours with opera star Isabel Leonard. Sharon Isbin began guitar studies at nine in Italy, and later studied with Andrès Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia and Rosalyn Tureck with whom she collaborated in publishing and recording first performance editions of the Bach lute suites for guitar. She authored the Classical Guitar Answer Book, and directs guitar departments at the Aspen Music Festival and The Juilliard School, which she created in l989 becoming the first and only guitar instructor in the institution’s 100-year history.
bergenPAC is located at 30 North Van Brunt Street in Englewood, NJ.
