Award-winning lutenist and guitarist Peter Croton is an active performer & recording artist as soloist & accompanist. In the press he has been called a "lyric poet of the lute" and has been praised for his "breathtaking virtuosity" and "astonishing range of tone colors and dynamics". His compositions for voice & lute have been described as "challenging and refined... highly suited for inclusion in today's concert repertoire". Peter, who grew up in the USA and lives in Switzerland, is an active performer & recording artist as soloist & accompanist and teaches lute, continuo, and historical performance practice at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and at the Conservatories of Music in Basel and Bern. As a child of six he began performing as a folk guitarist and singer and as a teenager he played in various jazz ensembles. Peter’s musical roots in folk and jazz music were supplemented by formal studies of lute at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (USA), and with Eugen Dombois and Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. In 1984 he won first prize at the "Erwin Bodky" competition for Early Music in Cambridge MA. Since 1984 he has been involved in numerous CD, television and radio productions as soloist and chamber musician. In 2001 six of his compositions were published by the German Lute Society, and four of his settings of texts by William Shakespeare for lute & voice were published in 2009 (Tree Edition). He is the author of the following tutors: "Figured Bass on the Classical Guitar" (Amadeus; SCB-Series, 2005), “Performing Baroque Music on the Classical Guitar” (Amazon-CreateSpace 2015) and “Performing Baroque Music on the Lute & Theorbo” (Amazon-CreateSpace 2015. His most recent CD, THE TWO FRANCESCOS (Carpe Diem) has been widely praised, for example by Bernhard Morbach (kulturradio.de: Berlin): "The lutenist Peter Croton pulls off an absolutely ideal recording of the works of two 'Renaissance-stars'. Compared with similar recordings by [...] the present CD deserves the very top ranking. Here everything harmonizes ideally: the virtuosity and taste of the performer, the instrument ... Peter Croton plays the music with the greatest possible clarity... One cannot play Francesco da Milano more convincingly than does Peter Croton." Homepage: www.peter-croton.com
