Fabricio Mattos is a classical guitarist and researcher in music performance. Being deeply committed to finding new paths for music-making in the 21st century, he has been performing regularly as a soloist and chamber musician in a great range of countries in five continents, from major music centres such as England, Italy, Switzerland, and the US, to countries with rising concerts tradition such as China, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Zambia. He has launched many recordings, played numerous concert tours worldwide, and won prizes such as the acclaimed ‘Julian Bream Award’, which in parallel to his other personal projects in music-making helped him to reach an increasingly higher level of performance and research.

 

Mattos has collaborated with dozens of composers, performers, poets, dancers, and other artists of many nationalities, backgrounds, and styles over the last few years, adding in quantity and quality to the present and future of guitar performance. Recently, Fabricio Mattos has only been involved in essentially collaborative projects. This attitude generated a healthy artistic output that could only be achieved through serious, passionate work in collaboration with other creative professionals. The most impressive results of such artistic view came with the creative enterprise WGC - Worldwide Guitar Connections, founded in 2011 and with which Mattos has travelled to 27 countries so far. WGC has contributed in numerous ways to expand the possibilities of music-making while recognising the work of talented composers from many countries through specially tailored commissions.

 

Fabricio Mattos was born in Curitiba, Brazil, and began his musical life at the age of six playing percussion instruments at carnival parties with his father, saxophonist Elio Mattos. After studying the flute, violin, and choir, he took classical guitar lessons with Dirceu Saggin, and afterwards with Luiz Cláudio Ferreira at the School of Music & Fine Arts of Paraná. In 2013 Mattos graduated with Distinction from the Masters of Music-Performance & Research programme at the Royal Academy of Music, having received a full scholarship from that institution. At RAM he received instrumental tuition from Michael Lewin, Timothy Walker, David Russell, Fabio Zanon, and Julian Bream, and developed a research project on gestural processes in the performance of music by Toru Takemitsu under the academic guidance of Sarah Callis and Neil Heyde. In 2023 Fabricio Mattos will become the first latin-american musician ever to be awarded a PhD from the Royal Academy of Music, researching how spaces, performance dynamics and layouts can influence the basic terminology of music performance. During his studies he ran two series at the RAM: ‘New Stages’, with experimental performance events part of his PhD research; and ‘Spencer Series’, performing on historical guitars and exploring rare prints and manuscripts from the world-renowned Spencer Collection. Recently, Fabricio Mattos has been invited to work as creative director in a wide range of projects, and has created and curated specialized content for institutions as diverse as Ibero & Latin American Music Society, the Asociación Argentina de Laúdes y Guitarras Antiguas, the BBC Radio, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has recently contributed a chapter for the prestigious Routledge Companion to the Sound of Space published in November 2024. He is co-founder and creative director of the New Stages Creations.