JOURNEY TO AUSTRIA RUST GUITAR FESTIVAL

              March 30^th 2015, I travelled to Austria, I was invited by Gabriel Guillén to the Rust Guitar Festival that he organised and manages. Rust is a small and beautiful city near the border with Hungary, storks make their nests on its roofs and at this time of the year some of them were already there. Just outside the town, in the country, there are buffalos and sheep that cut the grass avoiding thus the use of machines. In Rust you can enjoy peace; and silence. It is also a region of excellent wines, really good by the way, that I had the opportunity to taste with great pleasure during my visit.

I loved the festival due to its quality, and especially because it is a familiar festival, with a cosy and nice atmosphere. And all the participants have a really high level.

There I met the guitarists Douglas Esteves and Andrés Tapia that played separate concerts the day of my arrival and, as usual, the audience was impressed by the quality of their performance. I also had the pleasure to meet SenioDíaz that holds arts administration of the competition “AlirioDíaz”.

Nicky Eggl, the owner of the shop Acoustics Klangfarbe in Viena, took some of our guitars so that people could try them. Among them, we took the Auditorio Duo, the second one we have constructed with the double top and double back system, people liked it a lot due to its capacity of its sonority power to evolve quickly.

The next day Gabriel took me to visit Vienna, as I had never been there, and being a musical city par excellence, I could not miss it; although only a brief walk, it was more than enough to have a quick overview of its beauty and majesty. Of course we went to Mozart’s house. And we went back to Rust, where Gabriel had left Senio in charge of the festival during his absence.

My distributor in Germany and Austria, Gunther Reinhardt came with his wife Gaby to listen to my lecture about the family of guitar makers Ramírez in front of an audience of all ages that showed interest in listening to our history.

I had the pleasure to assist to the spectacular concerts of the GuitArtistas Gitarren quartet, the Trio Resonanz and the Duo Daniel Guillen &Radek Wiezcorek. I was also invited to take part as Competition jury. There was a high level among the competitors and there were very talented young people among them. The close of the festival was very emotional in the awards ceremony to the winners of the contest. And, finally, I went back to Madrid on April 2^nd with a new beautiful experience to tell and keep with my personal treasures.