David Starobin | |
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Born | 1951 (age 65–66) New York City, New York, United states |
Genres | Classical |
Occupation(s) | Guitarist, record producer, composer, writer, filmmaker |
Instruments | Guitar |
David Starobin (born September 27, 1951, New York City) is an American classical guitarist, record producer, composer, writer, and filmmaker.
Starobin started playing the guitar at the age of seven. He studied with Manuel Gayol until age 11, and Albert Valdes Blaine until age 15, whereupon he commenced lessons with the noted guitar pedagogue, Aaron Shearer. In 1973 he graduated from the Peabody Conservatory (Baltimore, Maryland), while directing Peabody's guitar chamber music program. During this period he coached and performed with pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher, becoming a member of Fleisher's chamber ensemble: The Theater Chamber Players.
Starobin has toured the U.S. as a guitar recitalist, chamber player and orchestral soloist performing at festivals including Marlboro, Aspen, Santa Fe Chamber, and Tanglewood, and with orchestras and ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, and the Emerson and Guarneri String Quartets as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He worked at Brooklyn College, Bennington College, the North Carolina School of the Arts, the State University of New York at Purchase, and the Manhattan School of Music. He is currently (as of 2013), employed at the Manhattan School of Music. In 2010, along with Jason Vieaux, he started the guitar program at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he is the holder of the Fondation Charidu Chair in Guitar Studies.
Starobin is the only guitarist to date (as of 2013) to receive Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Career Grant, in 1988. He was honored by Peabody Conservatory with its "Distinguished Alumni Award" (1999); and was given, with his wife, Becky Starobin, in 2007, ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for their work with Bridge Records.
In 2011, Starobin was inducted into the Guitar Foundation of America's Hall of Fame, earning the GFA's "Artistic Achievement Award". In 1990 he made the first recording of the newly discovered "10 Etudes" by Giulio Regondi (1822–1872), a work now regarded as a landmark in romantic-period guitar repertoire. In 2005 he performed works of Sor and Giuliani in London on a 1923 Herman Hauser parlor guitar for a DVD released by Mel Bay, Inc. (St. Louis, Missouri).