Ben Diamond – Classical Guitarist
Described as having a “profound tone and artistic finesse within his playing, representing our art and instrument in an absolutely profound way” by Turm Saiten – Masters of Classical Guitar in Dortmund in 2026, the Canadian guitarist Ben Diamond is a musician of unusually wide range. He works as a performer, as an educator and as a choral conductor, and the thread running through all of it is the music of his own time.
Support the artist
Buy with Ben Diamond’s code
Enter BEN50 at checkout and €50 is deducted from any guitar in the Siccas Luthiers range. Ben receives a share of the sale, at no extra cost to you.
New music, and the people around it
A recent graduate of the master’s programme in performance at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, his central interest is collaborating with composers to create new works for the guitar. That is a harder road than the standard repertoire. A premiere has no recordings to lean on and no received wisdom about how it should go; the player has to decide what the piece is.
The other half of his work is building the community around that music – which is where the choral conducting and the teaching belong, rather than being side activities. Both have brought recognition: he was named to the CBC 30 under 30 list of hot classical musicians in 2021, took the ArtsNL Emerging Artist of the Year award in the same year, has been nominated several times by MusicNL, and was nominated for the 2025 East Coast Music Award for Electronic Release of the Year.
Competitions and concerts
He has placed at the FCMF National Music Festival in Saskatchewan (2019), the Twisted Spruce International Competition (2022), the Domaine Forget International Guitar Competition in Quebec (2023), the Festival-concours de musique de Sherbrooke (2024) and Classival (2025), and took first prize at GuitarFest West in Calgary in 2026.
His concert work runs from solo recitals through chamber music to his recent symphonic debut with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra Sinfonia, with performances across Canada, the United States, Germany and France.
Ben Diamond on Siccas Luthiers guitars
He has recorded with us several times, each time on an instrument from the Siccas Luthiers range. Dale Kavanagh’s Prelude No. 1 on a Contemporary:
Carlo Domeniconi’s The Rose in the Garden on a Recital:
And Roland Dyens’s Tango en Skai, also on a Recital:
If one of these instruments is what you have been looking for, BEN50 gets you €50 off it and credits the sale to Ben.
Discover more players in our profiles of great classical guitarists, or see the Siccas Luthiers range.
