Album Notes

Award-winning guitarist Sharon Wayne has been an active soloist and chamber musician for over twenty years. A native of Southern California, she started teaching herself guitar when she was 8 years old. At 14, she began formal study of the classical guitar with Richard Glenn, and then went on to receive her BM and MM degrees at the University of Southern California, where she studied with William Kanengiser and James Smith. First Prize winner of the 1991 ASTA Solo Guitar Competition, she was also a semi-finalist at both the Guitar Foundation of America's International Competition in Buffalo, New York, and the Great Lakes Guitar Competition in Akron, Ohio. Ms. Wayne has given concerts at venues throughout the U.S. and in Japan, some highlights of which include San Francisco’s Green Room, Boston’s Tsai Performance Center, and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. She has shared the stage with world renowned guitarists including Liona Boyd and Scott Tennant, and as a founding member of the San Francisco Guitar Quartet has been involved in the generation of new repertoire for guitar, commissioning works by Carlo Domeniconi, Eitan Steinberg, and others. Sharon appears on five CD’s, including “In the Midst of Winds” (M.A.Recordings, Tokyo) with guitarist/composer Dusan Bogdanovic; “Black Opals” (SFGQ2001) with the San Francisco Guitar Quartet; and her solo CD “From the Heart,” (Joplin and Sweeney) which features works by 20th Century composers. Her playing has been lauded as “spectacular” with “superbly executed style” (Charleston Post and Courier) and the San Jose Mercury News called her “one of the most appealing new classical guitarists around.” Ms. Wayne served as Artistic Director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society from 2003 to 2005. A dedicated teacher as well, Sharon has held faculty positions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Santa Clara University.