Concert Guitarist

Biography

Renowned as a composer of works for symphony orchestra, concerto soloists, opera and chamber ensembles, Andrew Paul MacDonald is also a concert guitarist. There are twenty CDs of his compositions to date, one of which won the Juno Award for Best Composition, another both the East Coast Music Award and a Canadian Independent Music Award for best recording. Shuffletown Blue, his recording with the Hot Jazz Trio, has won critical acclaim and has been featured on a number of broadcasts. In his formative years, MacDonald completed intensive guitar studies with Alexandre Lagoya, Michael Lorimer, Ray Sealey and Manuel Lopez-Ramos. He has premiered a number of works especially written for him, including the concerto Nocturno by Canadian composer Glenn Buhr, and in 1979 was a finalist in the CBC National Performers’ Competition. In 1980 he presented the Canadian premiere of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Guitar Concerto and in 1982 made his first Carnegie Hall appearance at the ISCM festival in New York. He has performed many of his own compositions, including solos, chamber works and song cycles and has been recorded and broadcast on both the CBC and Société-Radio Canada. Besides the concertos mentioned above, he has also been the soloist in a number of other concertos, including those by Villa-Lobos and Rodrigo and recently starred in the premiere of his new concerto, Electric Pleasures.

Past Vice-President and Council member of the Canadian League of Composers and founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Musica Nova, MacDonald is a professor of composition at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke (Lennoxville), Québec. Biographical articles on MacDonald are to be found in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2ed., 2001), the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and the Canadian Who’s Who.