Violinist, teacher, composer
Associate professor of violin and chamber music at Bergen's Grieg Academy since 1987.
Born in Bilbao (Spain) in 1965, Ricardo developed an early interest in music, learning the rudiments of solfége at the age of six. At eight he began learning the classical guitar on his own before switching to violin and age ten.
While pursuing his classical music education, which eventually took him to Madrid, the USA and Denmark, Ricardo developed an interest in the more adventurous British popular music from the 1960s and 70s: men and women in plain clothes playing and singing bafflingly creative and complex music.
Ricardo has performed as violinist and conductor throughout Europe and North America, with short visits to Eurasia and the Middle East. He appears in some 50 CDs and has a small record company, Amethyst Records, devoted to unusual repertoire. Since 2016 he has cooperated with Musikproduktion Hoeflich (Munich) in the groundbreaking Amethyst Edition, publishing a monthly set of score and parts of 20th and 21st Century Norwegian works, engraved and annotated by Ricardo. He aims to produce 100 scores by April 2025. MPH published Ricardo's first book, "Opus Perseverat" in 2017. It is about five Norwegian composers with whom he has cooperated closely.
Most of Ricardo's research, where it concerns repertoire and approaches to teaching, has taken place at the Grieg Academy. There he has systematically introduced the students to great works and composers outside of the mainstream in combination with the great representatives from the standard repertoire. His approach to teaching is informed by his various teachers between 1976 and 1993 and by Guitar Craft (now called The Guitar Circle), a worldwide learning community founded in 1985 by the guitarist Robert Fripp.