Ritmos de Brasil Day 1, Photo by Margaret Reid

 

 

Photos by Margaret Reid and Olga Grishkova

 

Ritmos de Brasil, workshop and concert series was held January 20-30 and was part of the 10 year anniversary of the Zihuatanejo International Guitar Festival.  The event was sponsored in large part by the Brazilian government.

Our special invited guest, Arnaldo Freire from Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, has received several awards including the National Guitar Competition at the Mozarteum Faculty and the National Guitar Competition Souza Lima and was the first musician to perform unprecedented concert premieres for Guitar and Orchestra in Goiás, conducted by Joaquim Jaime by the Symphony Orchestra of Goiânia.  Compositions by Achille Picchi and Eduardo Escalante Estércio Marquez were written especially for the guitarist.  In Freire’s compositions we see a refined Brazilianness: folk songs, frevos, sambas, waltzes and other colors are mixed with post-tonal techniques, refined counterpoints and unusual instrumentation.  His compositions are published in the Arnaldo Freire Brazilian Contemporary Music Guide, edited by CDMC – Brazil / Unicamp, Paris

 

Arnaldo and his teachers: Hèrola Dilene, Lucas Borges, Italo Castrillon Wolff, Ana Eugènia Barrocal Hagalhaès, Kaloni Kaapu, Álvaro Paiva, Olga Grishkova, Joao Eudes, and Arielle Goncales Vieira, gave workshops four hours a day for 10 days, and held two Gala concerts of Brazilian music during the event.

Arnaldo Freire was an invited artist at the Zihuatanejo International Guitar Festival 2012 and enjoyed the city so much that he began looking for ways to return.  He offered guitar workshops for children in Brazil (using his own quick-learning methods and teaching system) and decided to offer a workshop for children here.  He solicited the funding for the Brazilian government (Fondo de Cultura da Brasil) to pay the cost of the airline tickets for himself and his 10 teachers, without this help offering the workshop would not have been possible.

 

ZI Guitar Fest AC (the non-profit association in charge of the Zihuatanejo Guitar Festival) offered to help with the expense of the transportation, housing and food for the musicians and the logistics of the event. 107 children in total participated, of these 60 received their registration for free and 47 of them received a free guitar to be able to participate in the workshop.   The scholarship children came from the education foundations: Por los Niños AC y Niños Adelante AC.  Sponsors were solicited from within the community to pay the scholarships and 51 individuals donated money to help us buy guitars and pay subscriptions.  The Insituto Lizardi offered us their classrooms to host the workshop for 100 children and restaurant El Pueblito allowed us the sue of the restaurant for the adults guitar and choir workshops.

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The sponsors of the event were: Fundo Nacional da Cultura de Brasil, Freiremusic.com

LIVE Entertainment, Hotel Amuleto, Restaurant El Pueblito, Por Los Niños, Instituto Lizardi, Bistro del Mar, DIF Municipal, Ayuntamiento de Zihuatanejo, Dirección de Cultura de Zihuatanejo, The Blind Onion, Restaurant Coconuts, Villas Miramar, Tamales Any, EM Arte Visual, The Cookie Shop.  The event received international televison covergae on Televisa in the news program of Carlos Loret de Mola y en Foro TV, you can see the video clip here

 

http://tvolucion.esmas.com/noticieros/primero-noticias/205506/ensenan-musica-brasilena-zihuatanejo

 

On our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/zguitarfest, you can see a variety of beautiful photos of the event showing the dedication of the teachers, the pride of the students and their parents as well as the enthusiastic response from the locals and tourists who attended the events.  It was a great music education event for Zihuatanejo and it gave us a tremendous amount of satisfaction to see the results of what we can accomplish for our community when we work together.

 

In 2013, the Zihuatanejo International Guitar Festival has 10 years of offering an international music festival in Zihuatanejo whose mission is to promote tourism by bringing cultural events to Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo.  To celebrate our 10 year anniversary Zi Guitar Fest AC has begun offering year-round events, our first event was a Gala concert in September, Ritmos de Brasil, was our second.

 

The 10th annual Zihuatanejo International Guitar festival will be held March 3 – 10, 2013.  As a non-profit event the festival counts on the help of the entire community to continue offering these types of cultural and educational events so important to our community.  We hope you all come out and attend the events of March 3 – 10 and help us meet our goals for 2013.  For more information about the festival visit our web site www.zihuafest.info