Beau Benson, Guitar

Biography

Beau Benson began his study of the guitar at the age of five, learning first from his father. At the age of nine, he began his study of classical music with guitarist and composer Brian Clement-Foreman. Mr. Benson recently completed his Bachelors of Music at the Meadows School of the Arts of Southern Methodist University, summa cum laude, where he studied guitar with Robert Guthrie and conducting with Drs. Jack Delaney and Paul Phillips. He has also studied guitar with many of today's leading performers and pedagogues, and was awarded a grant by the D'Adarrio Foundation for the Performing Arts to study and perform in Italy during the summer of 2000. Mr. Benson won second place in the 2000 Hubbard Chamber Music Series Solo Competition and was a finalist in the 2002 Stafford International Guitar Recital Competition in Stafford, U.K.

Mr. Benson currently serves as Associate Conductor for the Flower Mound Chamber Orchestra and Assistant Conductor for the Frisco Symphony. Additionally, he is a faculty member of the University of Houston's yearly guitar festival, serving as composer-in-residence and director of the guitar orchestra.

As a guitarist, Mr. Benson has appeared as a guest artist in recent seasons for organizations including the: North East Texas Symphony; Flower Mound Chamber Orchestra; Orchestra of New Spain; Mesquite Symphony; Houston Civic Symphony; American Musicological Society; Dallas Basically Beethoven Festival; University of Houston; Rice University; the Kansas City Guitar Society; the Dallas Guitar Society; the Spanish Consulate in Washington; and Guitar Houston. This season, Mr. Benson will conduct the premiere of his first orchestral tone poem, Fama, based on Virgil's Aeneid, with the Flower Mound Chamber Orchestra, and he will perform the guitar solo in the premiere of his Concerto #1 in c minor for guitar and winds with the Meadows Wind Ensemble. The Jugend Guitarren Orchester of Hessen will also premiere his overture Celaeno on their summer tour of Poland.