A $13,000 grant from The Augustine Foundation is supplementing Shenandoah Guitar Festival operations this summer.
The festival brings together guitar professionals, students, amateurs, enthusiasts, and a local and regional audience to celebrate the art of the guitar through concerts, masterclasses, presentations, and a participant guitar ensemble. The June 27-29 festival, held at Shenandoah Conservatory on Shenandoah University’s main campus in Winchester, Virginia, includes a lineup of world-class performers and educators.
The festival’s director is Colin Davin, M.M., director of Shenandoah’s Guitar Studio and associate professor of guitar. Guest artists include Sharon Isbin, Rafael Padron, Jocelyn Gould, the violin-guitar duo ArcoStrum, and Nicoletta Todesco, who also directs the festival’s guitar orchestra.
Shenandoah Conservatory, Virginia’s oldest center for performing arts training, is a perfect fit for the guitar festival, as it has a long legacy of shaping musical and performing arts in Virginia and beyond. It is an incubator for groundbreaking initiatives and home to award-winning students and faculty as well as some of the nation’s top performing arts degree programs.
Although the classical guitar is at the core of the Shenandoah Guitar Festival’s programming, the festival also embraces the brilliant and deep artistry of guitarists from other genres. Festival organizers believe that the history and traditions of the guitar demonstrate a profound integration across cultures, styles, time, and place.
The Augustine Foundation was established approximately 45 years ago through a donation by Rose Augustine, whose husband Albert Augustine developed modern classical guitar strings, which are still sold through Augustine Strings/Albert Augustine, Ltd.
