Astrid Mertens – Classical Guitarist
Astrid Mertens is a Belgian classical guitarist whose work runs along two lines that rarely meet in one player: the Spanish concert repertoire of the twentieth century on one side, and contemporary music written in her own decade on the other.
Antwerp
She completed her master's degree Magna Cum Laude at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, studying with Omán Kaminsky and Roland Broux. Belgium has quietly become one of the crossroads of the European guitar scene — Brussels and Antwerp draw students from across the continent — and Mertens belongs to the generation that has come out of it.
Masterclasses and the Volterra Project
She has worked in masterclasses with several of the instrument's most distinctive teachers: Sérgio Assad, Antigoni Goni, Zoran Dukić and Pavel Steidl among them — four players who could hardly be less alike, which says something about the breadth she was after.
In the summer of 2023 she was selected for the Volterra Project in Italy, an international summer institute for classical guitar that takes only a dozen participants per edition. The teaching that year came from Antigoni Goni and Laura Snowden, alongside specialists in music physiology and career practice — an unusually complete idea of what a young musician needs. Goni has also recorded for our channel, most recently Nazareth's Confidências with Eleonora Perretta.
Rodrigo and the twentieth century
Mertens describes a particular affinity for twentieth-century repertoire, and above all for Joaquín Rodrigo. She has performed both the Concierto de Aranjuez and Heitor Villa-Lobos' guitar concerto several times in the version with piano.
Playing a concerto with piano rather than orchestra is its own discipline. The guitarist loses the orchestral colour that carries the solo line and has to supply that weight alone, against an instrument that can drown six strings without effort. It is the format in which concertos are most often learned — and the one that reveals most about a player's sense of proportion.
Ensemble work and new music
Alongside her solo playing she is an active chamber musician. She is a member of Ensemble XXI, which is devoted to contemporary music and performed under the conductor Ed Spanjaard in March 2025, and co-founder of the guitar duo Duo Otare with Yenthe Geudens.
Her concerts have taken her to November Music, the Transit Festival, AMUZ, De Singel and the KMSKA in Antwerp — venues that sit at the centre of the Flemish new-music scene rather than on the classical guitar circuit. Guitarists who move in that world are still the exception.
At Siccas Guitars
For our channel she recorded a piece from the other end of the repertoire: the Fantasía sobre el Paño, also known as El punto de la Habana, by Julián Arcas, on a 2009 double-top guitar by Antonius Müller.
Arcas (1832–1882) is a name worth more attention than he gets. He taught the young Francisco Tárrega in Barcelona and advised the luthier Antonio de Torres on the soundboards of the instruments that became the template for the modern classical guitar — both the repertoire and the physical form of the guitar pass through him. Our article on her recording of the Fantasía looks at the piece and the performance in detail.
Hearing a player of contemporary music turn to a nineteenth-century Spanish fantasy is not a contradiction. Both ask the same thing: that the performer decide what the music means, because the score alone will not settle it.
Discover more players in our profiles of great classical guitarists, and hear another Belgian ensemble in our article on the Belgium Guitar Duo.
