Donia Foglia – Classical Guitarist
Donia Foglia is an Italian classical guitarist based in Germany. She visited our studio in 2024 to record a full concert, and the programme she brought said a great deal about her as a musician: a Bach suite, a Spanish miniature, an Italian homage and a piece by one of Britain's most uncompromising modernists — five composers spanning three centuries, played on five different instruments.
Bach: Suite BWV 1009
The concert opens with four movements from Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suite No. 3, BWV 1009 — Prelude, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue — played on a 2024 guitar by Giacomo Guadagna.
Bach's cello suites have become central to the guitar precisely because they are difficult in an interesting way. A single melodic line has to imply the harmony beneath it, and the player must decide where a bass note is held, where a phrase breathes, and how much of the implied counterpoint to make audible. Foglia's reading of the Sarabande — the emotional centre of the suite — was later released as a separate recording. Our Bach repertoire guide maps the works that have made the transition to six strings, among them the Prelude from the first Cello Suite.
Torroba: Torija
From Bach the programme moves to Spain. Torija comes from the suite Castillos de España by Federico Moreno Torroba, a cycle of miniatures each named after a Spanish castle. Torija is the quiet one: a slow, elegiac piece that asks for colour rather than display, and one of the most beloved short works in the repertoire.
Foglia played it on a 1992 Matthias Dammann — an instrument by the German luthier who pioneered double-top construction and changed what a modern concert guitar could do. Read more in our article on Torija and our portrait of Moreno Torroba.
Podera and Birtwistle: the contemporary half
The second half of the programme is where the choice of repertoire becomes a statement. Omaggio a Benvenuto Terzi (Preludio breve) by Giovanni Podera is a tribute to Benvenuto Terzi (1892–1980), the Italian guitarist and composer who did much to build the twentieth-century Italian guitar school. Foglia played it on a guitar by Marco Lijoi.
Then comes Guitar and White Hand by Harrison Birtwistle (1934–2022), one of the leading figures of the British avant-garde — a composer whose music is austere, rhythmically severe and entirely unconcerned with charm. Very few guitarists programme Birtwistle. Placing him between an Italian homage and Castelnuovo-Tedesco is a deliberate act of curation, and it tells you that Foglia is not building a career on repertoire that flatters an audience.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Capricho de Goya XX
The concert closes with Capricho de Goya No. XX, "Obsequio al Maestro" by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, again on the 1992 Dammann. The 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195 is the composer's most ambitious guitar work — a cycle of musical portraits written in 1961 after the etchings of Francisco Goya.
We have looked at other pieces from the same cycle in our articles on Capricho No. 1 and Capricho No. 18. More about the composer, whose partnership with Andrés Segovia produced close to a hundred guitar works, in our portrait of Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Further recordings
Foglia has returned to our channel several times since the concert. In 2025 she recorded Tárrega's Fantasia on Themes from La Traviata, a virtuoso operatic paraphrase in the nineteenth-century manner, on a double-top guitar by Steven Toon. Our article on Francisco Tárrega covers the composer who shaped the modern solo repertoire more than any other.
Her Bach Sarabande and her Torija were also released as individual recordings — a chance to hear the same playing without the frame of a full recital.
A programme as a portrait
What stays with a listener after this concert is the range. Moving from a Bach suite to Birtwistle in the space of fifteen minutes requires not just technical adaptability but a genuine willingness to change one's sound for each composer — and to switch instruments to do it. That is a rarer quality than virtuosity, and it is the reason her recordings repay a second listen.
Discover more players in our profiles of great classical guitarists.
