| Art Profile |
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Cem Duruöz was born in Ankara. He started playing guitar with Safa Gürbüz and continued with Ahmet Kanneci. Duruöz was awarded first place in the Turkish National Classic Guitar Competition at the age of seventeen. He graduated from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the Middle East Technical University and then continued to study guitar with John Duarte, Oscar Ghiglia and Eliot Fisk, with scholarships from the Italian and British governments. Duruöz completed his master’s degree at the San Francisco Conservatory and the Julliard School with Sharon Isbin.
Duruöz has performed on four continents in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Japan, France, Greece, Spain, Serbia, Bosnia, Poland, Mexico, throughout Turkey and the USA. He has released three CDs to international acclaim. His debut album Pièces de Viole, which features his arrangements of Marais’ French baroque gamba music, was released by Centaur and received rave reviews in magazines such as American Record Guide, Fanfare, Classics Today, Classical Guitar and BBC Music. Being a contemporary music enthusiast, Duruöz commissioned new works from emerging composers and recorded them in his second Centaur release Contemporary Music for Guitar along with masterpieces of the guitar repertoire by Walton and Davidovsky. Duruöz’s most recent solo CD, Desde el Alma - Tango Classics was released in 2006 under ADA-Müzik label and called “a masterpiece” by Argentinian critics. The CD features a variety of tango styles such as the milonga and vals as well as some of the most famous tangos transcribed by him using the interpretations of the legendary Argentine Tango orchestras of the 20th century.
Duruöz has collaborated with bandoneón/tango master Raul Jaurena, gambist John Dornenburg and soprano Camille Zamora. A frequent soloist, Duruöz has appeared with more than ten orchestras regularly performing Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez among others, under the batons of such conductors as Michel Tabachnik, Angel Gil-Ordóñez, Antonio Pirolli and Erol Erdinç. In January 2008 Duruöz gave the world premiere performance of Concierto Anatolia, a guitar concerto featuring Turkish melodies and rhythms written for him by American composer David Hahn. Duruöz currently teaches guitar at Wesleyan University.
Reference: duruoz.com; ccrma.stanford.edu; guitarramagazine.com; turkishjournal.com
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