Patterson Sutton Duo
Biography Patterson Sutton Duo
Patterson Sutton Duo
Praised by The Strad magazine for their "wit and imagination", the trailblazing Patterson/Sutton cello and guitar duo continue to be in demand as they bring the rich cello and guitar repertoire to audiences around the world. The Patterson/Sutton duo were featured artists at the 2016 Guitar Foundation of America Convention and have an ongoing relationship with The Juilliard School as Juilliard Global Visiting Artists. The duo have been featured on Performance Today/American Public Media, Radio New Zealand, Fine Music Radio South Africa, among many others.
The Patterson/Sutton Duo’s debut album Cold Dark Matter was released in 2013 on MSR Classics to critical acclaim. Composer and guitarist, Dušan Bogdanović declared: “Everything [on Cold Dark Matter] is performed with excellence and sensitivity. I especially like the beautiful tone and sense of lyricism, though the virtuosity of both is apparent.” The Duo continues to push the boundaries of the repertoire by commissioning new music for cello and guitar from top composers such as Stephen Goss and Ricardo Iznaola. Recent concert appearances include the Florida Guitar Foundation, Portland International Guitar Series, Knoxville Guitar Society, Cheyenne Guitar Society, University of Colorado Guitar Festival, Saigon Guitar Series in Vietnam, Shanghai Conservatory in China, Tulane University, University of Denver, Louisiana State University, Princeton Symphony Chamber Music Series, Strings Music Festival, and the Front Range Chamber Players, to name a few. Their research in the field of cello and guitar performance has culminated in lecture-recitals at the Dublin Guitar Symposium, International Guitar Research Center Conference in the UK, and the Guitar Foundation of America Convention. Soundboard magazine called their GFA talk “a deeply inspiring analysis and performance”.
The Patterson/Sutton Duo are strong believers in the transformative power of educational outreach. Funded by the US State Department, the duo held a guest-artist residency at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul in 2014, where they worked with the budding generation of Afghan musicians and gave a performance at the Canadian Embassy of Afghanistan. More recently, The Juilliard School has sent the duo to Bratislava, Budapest, Dublin, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and New York City as guest-artists to perform and teach at international schools as part of the Juilliard/Nord Anglia global intuitive.
Dr. Kimberly Patterson holds degrees from the Juilliard School, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Patrick Sutton holds degrees from the University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Boulder. The duo became husband and wife in June of 2017.
"Stephen Goss’s music receives hundreds of performances worldwide each year. It has been recorded on over 80 CDs by more than a dozen record labels, including EMI, Decca, Telarc, Virgin Classics, Naxos, and Deutsche Grammophon. His output embraces multiple genres: orchestral and choral works, chamber music, and solo pieces. He is considered ‘One of the guitar’s finest living composers.’" — International Record Review
Stephen Goss
Goss’s work is marked by a fascination with time and place – both immediate and remote – and the musical styles that evoke them. In many of his compositions, contrasting styles are juxtaposed through abrupt changes of gear. As BBC Music Magazine noted ‘Goss weaves together an eclectic range of influences – at once retrospective and forward-looking’. His compositional voice is shaped by his parallel career as a guitarist – that is to say, as a performer, transcriber, arranger, improviser and collaborator with other composers and performers. Not surprisingly, his music often tests the boundaries between all these activities and original composition.
Recent work includes several projects with the guitarist John Williams, who has recorded and toured Steve’s Guitar Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Describing the concerto in an interview for Soundboard, Williams said ‘I don’t know of any guitar concerto which is as consistently successful on all fronts’.
Steve’s music has been performed by many of the world’s leading orchestras including: The Russian National Orchestra (under Mikhail Pletnev), The China National Symphony Orchestra, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, The State Symphony Orchestra ‘New Russia’, The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, The Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. In his role as composer-in-residence for the Orpheus Sinfonia, Steve wrote the Piano Concerto, (released by Signum Classics in 2013), and the Concerto for Five (for the unique combination of violin, saxophone, cello, bass, piano and orchestra). Steve’s Albéniz Concerto for guitar and orchestra was released to great critical acclaim on EMI Classics in 2010. A Concerto of Colours, for guitar and wind ensemble, was commissioned by a consortium of 13 American wind orchestras in 2017. Most recently, Steve has written the Koblenz Concerto for two guitars and orchestra (for SoloDuo) and the Theorbo Concerto for Matthew Wadsworth: the first concerto ever written for the theorbo.
Other commissions have come from: percussionist Evelyn Glennie, cellist Natalie Clein, flutist William Bennett, and tenor Ian Bostridge, as well as guitarists David Russell, Xuefei Yang, Zoran Dukić, Miloš Karadaglić, Aniello Desiderio, and Lukasz Kuropaczewski. Steve’s project with Charles Jencks, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, was profiled on The South Bank Show, the UK’s premier Arts TV programme. Steve’s eclectic approach has led to collaborations with artists as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alt-J, and Avi Avital.
As a guitarist, Steve has worked with many leading composers (such as Toru Takemitsu, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Elliott Carter) and toured and recorded extensively with the Tetra Guitar Quartet and other ensembles.
Born in 1964, Stephen Goss studied at the Royal Academy of Music (where he won the Julian Bream Prize) and the Universities of Bristol and London (where he completed his doctorate). His composition teachers included Edward Gregson, Robert Saxton, Peter Dickinson and Anthony Payne, and he studied guitar with Michael Lewin. Steve is currently Professor of Composition and Director of the International Guitar Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and a Professor of Guitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He is an Arsenal season ticket holder. Jonathan Leathwood
