It is with great joy that we welcome you to the III Ibero-American Guitar Festival in Washington DC . As in previous years Berta Rojas, our Music Director has put together an exciting program that includes Ibero-America’s best representatives of the Guitar. Once again, we will have the opportunity to experience the richness of our region’s diversity, musical heritage and traditions from folk to classical to jazz, all in one weekend. This year we are thrilled with the birth of new and fruitful partnership with The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and The Smithsonian Latino Center. These two entities of the Smithsonian Institution provide invaluable support by providing a beautiful setting for the Festival, important public awareness resources and a professional team of committed cultural professionals. This important collaboration has also opened up the spectrum of the region’s diversity to include musicians of US Hispanic/Latino and Native descent, both important parts of the Ibero-American cultural landscape. We are infinitely grateful to Continental Airlines. In a year of particular economic distress, it is their sensibility for the arts and their belief in the importance of culture for a society’s wellbeing that have maintained their support, which makes this Festival possible. We hope you enjoy the program, fall in love with the music and come back to our events to learn more about Ibero-America and all the wonderful things it has to offer,

Patricia Abdelnour
President
Ibero-American Cultural Attaches Association.


Welcome to the “Third Ibero-American Guitar Festival,” an Ibero-American Serenade to the City of Washington DC. An integral part of the Ibero-American culture, the guitar is probably the instrument most often played throughout our countries. The variety of music it gives voice to is as vast as Ibero-America itself. The Festival seeks therefore to highlight the different musical expressions of these nations: from Flamenco to Fado, from Classical to Crossover, to the different folk sounds of these our Americas, including, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, just to name a few. In this Third Edition we present a tribute to one of the greatest composers of all times, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). In commemorating the 50th Anniversary of his passing to immortality we pay homage to his legacy. Villa-Lobos wrote some of his most inspired compositions for the guitar: 12 Studies, 5 Preludes, the “Suite Popular Brasileira”, the “Choro” and his Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra. There is no guitarist in the world that does not play his music. The instrument is indebted to him; he has given us technical and musical challenges that have taken it to another level. We are honored, therefore, to celebrate this legacy in what we hope to craft into a new Washington tradition: the Ibero-American Serenade to the Capital City. I would like to express my special gratitude to the Association of Ibero-American Cultural Attachés for entrusting me with the Artistic Direction of this Festival, to Patricia Abdelnour for her leadership, to Ada Hernandez for her vision, to Howard Bass and through him the Smithsonian Institution, for embracing this Festival, to Nestor Alejandro Rosa for thinking of this fabulous idea and Magdalena Duhagon for her dedication to this Festival. My sincere appreciation goes to George Firmezza, Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Brazil and to Mariangela Bitencourt. Most especially, I extend my deepest appreciation to every artist participating in the Festival. They are the reason we celebrate.

Berta Rojas
Artistic Director