Oscar Ghiglia

Born of an artistic family – his father and grandfather both famed painters, his mother an accomplished pianist – O.G. had to choose between a path strewn with brushes and colours and a world cut into harmony and melody.

Oscar Ghiglia

Though his early choice produced a few hundred water colours and a number of oil paintings, he soon realized music was his way. For this decision he thanks his dad, who one day made him pose for a painting showing a guitarist… For this he had to hold his father’s guitar, a companion to his artistic musings in front of his forming works. This painting and the strong advice of his mother towards following the classic guitar course, as it was started at the S. Cecilia Conservatory, of Rome, were for him the start to a lifetime of disciplined dedication to music.

Graduated from the conservatory, O.G. began soon his apprenticeship beside the great Master Andrés Segovia, who was his major influence and inspiration during his formative years. Later O.G. “inherited” Segovia’s glorious Class in Siena’s Accademia Chigiana and spread his own teaching around the five continents in a sister vocation to his concertizing.

O.G is proud of having founded such strongholds of guitar teaching as the Guitar Department at the Aspen Music Festival (Colorado, USA) as well as in the Festival de Musique des Arcs and the “Incontri Chitarristici di Gargnano”, of having been artist in residence, or visiting professor in such centers as the Fine Arts Centreof Banff, Alberta, the Cincinnati, San Francisco Conservatories, The Juilliard, the Hartt School, the Northwestern University of Evanston Ill, as well as The Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Milan, the Rubin Academy of Jerusalem and othr equivalen schools all over the world.

From 1983 till 2004 his teaching was carried on, year long, in Basel Switzerland, where he held the professorship in guitar at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel.

In all these centers and elsewhere,.Ghiglia has been nurturing talents, forming or perfecting young artists’ musical outlook and interpretation.

Besides touring as a solo performer O.G. has played and recorded with such names as singers Victoria de Los Angeles, Jan de Gaetani, Gerald English, John mc Collum; flutists as J.P.Rampal, Julius Baker; ensembles as the Juilliard String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, the Cleveland String Quartet, the Quartetto d’archi di Venezia, the Tokyo String Quartet; violinists as Giuliano Carmignola, Franco Gulli, Salvatore Accardo, Regis Pasquier; violist as B. Giuranna, P Zuckerman; cellists as K. Adam, A Roman, L.Varga; guitarists as E. Fisk, S.Fukuda, L Guerra, Antigoni Goni, Elena Papandreou. O.G. was a founding member of the the International Classic Guitar Quartet (with, in different turns: Benjamin Bunch,.O. Koga, Anders Miolin, S. Schmidt, Andreas v.Wangenheim,)

More about Ghiglia

Presently, after his newest CD “Manuel Ponce’ Guitar music” a new set of recording projets are under way ( note a J.S Bach lute works CD, in the final editing process). Founder of the International Guitar Competition of Gargnano (Italy) O.G. boasts a very high number of first prize winners among his students, in competitions around the world.