Giulia Ballaré: Echoes of Brazil: A Tribute to Heitor Villa-Lobos

Giulia Ballaré (1987, Novara, Italy) is considered one of her generation’s most promising classical guitar soloists and performs regularly in prestigious venues worldwide. We are indeed fortunate that she's stopping in Brooklyn to support her latest recording Heitor Villa-Lobos: Complete Solo Works for Guitar .

Giulia teaches at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève (Switzerland) and Conservatorio “A. Vivaldi” in Alessandria (Italy).

Her first album, Lirically Spain, was released in 2013 on dotGuitar. She later released Untuned Guitar (2019) the Spanish label JSM Records. In 2019 she founded the Geneva Guitar Duo with the french guitarist Pauline Gauthey. The 2023, the duo released Lo que vendrá (2023) also on JSM Records. Her most recent release (2025) is Heitor Villa-Lobos: Complete Solo Guitar Works with Da Vinci Classics.

Giulia began playing guitar at age nine and graduated in 2012 from the Conservatory in Novara under Maestro Guido Fichtner. She has attended masterclasses with many leading figures in the classical guitar world, including Oscar Ghiglia, David Russell, Pavel Steidl, Paolo Pegoraro, Marcin Dylla, Judicaël Perroy, Aniello Desiderio, and Adriano Del Sal.

At age twenty, after participating in the Erasmus study-abroad program in Spain, she decided to devote herself fully to the guitar. Between 2013 and 2018, she won more than 30 prizes in international competitions, including first prizes at the Andrés Segovia (Linares, 2018), Ciudad de Coria (Spain, 2017), Forum Gitarre Wien (Austria, 2016), and Mottola (Italy, 2013) competitions; second prizes at the J. Tomàs–Petrer (Spain, 2018), Enrico Mercatali (Gorizia, 2017/18), Thessaloniki Guitar Competition (Greece, 2017), Mertz Competition (Bratislava, 2016), and Montenegro International Competition (Podgorica, 2016); and third prizes at the M. Pittaluga International Competition (Alessandria, 2017), A. Frauchi International Competition (Moscow, 2017), J. Tomàs–Petrer (Spain, 2017), Sevilla (Spain, 2017), and Emilio Pujol Concorso Internazionale (Italy, 2017).

She is a Savarez and Tonebase Artist and plays a Roberto De Miranda guitar.