Fisk, Eliot

b Philadelphia, 10 Aug 1954).
American guitarist.

His teachers included not only Andrès Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia and Alivio Diaz, but also the harpsichordists Ralph Kirkpatrick and Albert Fuller at Yale, where he founded the guitar department and where he earned his BA (1976) and MM (1977). He made his solo début in 1976 at Alice Tully Hall, New York, and in 1980 won the International Classical Guitar Competition in Gargnano, Italy. His London début, at the Wigmore Hall, was in 1984. He taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, 1982–9, and in 1989 was appointed to the Salzburg Mozarteum. He has appeared frequently in solo recitals, as an orchestral soloist and in chamber music. In the tradition of his mentor, Andrés Segovia, Fisk has expanded the repertory of the guitar through his own transcriptions, which include works by Bach (the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin), Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Paganini (the 24 Caprices) and Scarlatti. His playing is marked by a boldly personal interpretive sense and a prodigious ease of technique. In contemporary repertory he is especially noted as an exponent of the works of Berio and George Rochberg.