Thomas Binkley Award

2024 Recipient: Cristian Gutiérrez

He is one of the most outstanding Chilean performers in the specialty of early music. He studied guitar at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, finishing with the first place in his class. He then received a scholarship from the Andes Foundation to continue his specialization studies in Spain with Xavier Díaz-Latorre, and later obtained his Master of Music degree at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Holland, under the direction of Joachim Held, finishing with the highest grade and special prize.

He has made numerous recordings for labels such as Sony Classical, Delta Classic, Audioguy Records Seoul and since 2013 he has been an artist for the Carpe Diem Records label. As a soloist and member of various ensembles he has performed in more than 20 countries working with outstanding early music personalities such as Aarón Zapico, Monica Huggett, Bruce Dickey, Gabriel Garrido, Charles Toet, Manfredo Kraemer, Michael Chance, Pedro Estevan, etc.

He is a guest professor at the Hudební lahůdky academy in Prague, Czech Republic, and regularly gives courses and master classes at the Akademie für Alte Musik in Bremen, Germany. He has also given courses in Latin American countries such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia and Argentina.
He is musical director of the trio La Pulsata, an ensemble dedicated to the study and rescue of music for plucked strings of the colonial baroque and of the group La Consonancia, an ensemble dedicated to baroque music.

He is currently an academic at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, in Santiago, Chile, where he is director of the program of studies “Performance in Early Music”. Since 2020 he is an academic at the Conservatory of the University of Chile in the Master’s program in Music Performance.

cristiangutierrez.cl

I would like to thank you for this unexpected and welcome news. I am delighted and honored to be awarded the Thomas Binkley Award for 2024 and I accept it with great pride. The initiative to support and stimulate the growth of Early Music in America seems to me of enormous importance and a matter of first priority in the spirit of reconstructing, above all, our own musical past. This way of creating ties seems to me more pertinent than ever, that the study of the music of other times may guide us in finding new directions. Warm regards to all of you and thank you once again. – Cristian Gutiérrez

Past Recipients