Marcin Dylla was born in 1976 in Chorzów, Poland, and received his first guitar lessons at the Ruda Śląska Music Conservatory. From 1995 to 2000 he studied at the Academy of Music in Katowice with Adi Wanda Palacz, then continued with Oscar Ghiglia, Carlo Marchione, and Sonja Prunnbauer at academies in Basel, Freiburg, and Maastricht. Between 1996 and 2007 he won nineteen first prizes at international guitar competitions, capped by the gold medal at the 2007 Guitar Foundation of America International Competition in Los Angeles, which was followed by a tour of more than fifty North American cities and a CD for Naxos that reached the label’s Top 10 bestseller list. In 2006 Cecilia Rodrigo, daughter of composer Joaquín Rodrigo, chose Dylla to give the world premiere of her father’s newly discovered Toccata (1933) at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. He is currently a professor of guitar at the Music Academy in Katowice and at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.

Hailed by the Washington Post as among the most gifted guitarists alive, Dylla’s unmatched run of competition victories in the late 1990s and 2000s helped set the modern standard for the international guitar competition circuit, and his recordings and touring have carried the instrument into major concert halls and orchestral programs worldwide. His professorships in Katowice and Münster place him at the center of training the next generation of European classical guitarists.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcin_Dylla
• https://www.marcindylla.com/biography/