Live recording samples:
Toccata by Michelangelo Galilei (unedited)
Elegia a Tárrega by Daniel Fortea (recorded in concert)
Timothy Burris has performed throughout Europe and the US, both as a soloist and an accompanist. He has appeared in concert with such esteemed artists as the mezzo Jennifer Lane and the keyboardist Robert Hill, as well as under the baton of Peter Schreier and René Clemencic, among others. In a review of The Songs of Philip Rosseter, Part II, The Lute Society Magazine said of his skills as an accompanist: “Burris … plays with beautiful tone and is an absolutely first-class accompanist.”
As is the case with many lutenists, Mr Burris began by playing classical guitar. He studied privately with Chris Kachian, now the head of the St Thomas University Guitar Department, in St Paul. He also performed in guitar master classes led by Jeffrey Van, as well as with Michael Lorimer (at the University of California, Davis) and John Holmquist (at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, Milwaukee).
Before moving to the Netherlands, Mr Burris also performed in lute master classes with both Paul O’Dette and Lyle Nordstrom (then of the Musicians of Swanne Alley) and Toyohiko Satoh (at the College of St Scholastica, Duluth).
In his first year at The Hague’s Royal Conservatory, in addition to lute studies under Toyohiko Satoh, he studied guitar with the head of the conservatory’s guitar department, the Uruguayan Antonio Pereira Arias. (Also an accomplished double bass player, Pereira Arias studied guitar with Atilio Rapat and Andres Segovia, as well as Musicology under Emilio Pujol).
He graduated from the Royal Conservatory in 1988 with a performance diploma in lute. From 1990-96 he was lute instructor at the Royal Flemish Conservatory in Antwerp (now called the Royal Academy of Fine Arts). Since 2000, he has been on the faculty of the Portland Conservatory of Music. He is also a member of the applied music faculty at Colby College, where he conducted the Collegium during the 2015-16 academic year.
Mr Burris was the founder and artistic director of Portland, Maine’s Early Music Festival, which was sponsored by the Portland Conservatory of Music from 2011 through 2019.
In addition to solo recordings, he has done CD projects with Jennifer Lane and Tamara Matthews with New York Baroque; Willeke te Brummelstroete with Koorprojekt Rotterdam; Timothy Neill Johnson; and Ensemble Pentacost, among others. He can be heard playing Bach’s c minor Prelude in Shock Act, the prize-winning short-film DVD by Seth Grossman.
His foreign-language talents include fluency in German, French, and Dutch, and excellent facility in Spanish and Italian. His linguistic skills enhance his abilities as an accompanist, as well as adding to his effectiveness in coaching singers and instrumentalists in educational events such as master classes. He has an especial interest in French poetry, something he nurtured during more than two years of private study with French professors at the universities of Amsterdam and Leiden. His dissertation research was done primarily at Dresden’s Sächsische Landesbibliothek, in the final stages with the generous support of a Fulbright fellowship (to the Technical University of Dresden).
Instruments:
Mr Burris performs exclusively on instruments by Richard Berg of Ottawa, including an English two-headed-style baroque lute with a body based on Burkholtzer (2002) and a back of ‘drowned birch’; an ebony and ivory liuto attiorbato (2007) and an Italian theorbo (2012) with a back of shaded yew, the latter two instruments based on originals by Pietro Railich.
Mr Burris’s guitar (2015) is a copy of FE17 (FE = First Epoque) by Antonio de Torres Jurado, widely considered the father of the modern classical guitar. The model is unusual for its relatively small body size and light construction. The back and sides, like the original, are made of curly maple, now a relative rarity in classical guitar construction. The original instrument was presented (in 1869) to the seventeen-year-old Francisco Tárrega by Torres after the great luthier heard him play in Sevilla. The original is currently in the collection of crime novelist Jonathan Kellerman.
EDUCATION:
Soloist’s diploma, Royal Conservatory, The Hague
Ph.D., Duke University