Raúl Prieto Ramírez will be represented in North America by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists. He is the first organist-in-residence at the Auditorio Nacional de Musica in Madrid, Spain’s national concert hall. When he was appointed at age 27, he increased attendance at the hall’s organ recitals by a multiple of 30 during the first six months. His performances on YouTube are seen by an international network of devotees. At his annual recital on the largest organ in Catalonia, at the Basilica in Mataro, Spain, he regularly draws an audience of over a thousand.
At the age of eleven, Ramírez became fascinated by the organ in a local church and for the next five years taught himself to play, while pursuing all the information he could find about the instrument in libraries. When he enrolled at Salamanca University to study philosophy, he came across the ideas of the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache and decided to devote his life to music. He studied piano with Leonid Sintsev at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg, organ with Ludger Lohmann at the Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, and participated in masterclasses with Marie-Claire Alain, Guy Bovet, Lionel Rogg, Eric Lebrun, Zsigmond Szathmáry, and Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini.
Ramírez has performed with the Spanish National Orchestra, the Castilla y Leon Symphony Orchestra, and the National Spanish Choir. He was the organist for, and an actor in, a film featured at over 300 cinema festivals around the world in 2008. His first two compact disc releases on the Actus label in autumn 2009 were recorded at Santiago de Compostela in Spain and at Milan Cathedral in Italy.
For information:
www.concertartists.com.
