Duo Vona – Classical Guitar Duo
Duo Vona was established as an ensemble in 2022, when the guitarists Hope Cramsie from the United Kingdom and Ingrid Horvei Lyslo from Norway met in the international guitar community in Brussels — a city that has quietly become one of Europe's crossroads for young classical guitarists.
Hope Cramsie
Originally from Herefordshire and now based between London and Belgium, Hope Cramsie graduated from the Royal College of Music with First Class Honours, spending part of her studies on an Erasmus exchange at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen with Jesper Sivebæk. In 2023 she took First Prize at the Ivor Mairants Guitar Award and became a Young Artist of the Worshipful Company of Musicians.
She went on to a master's degree at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel with Antigoni Goni — the Greek guitarist and teacher whose class in Brussels has become a magnet for players from across Europe, and who has also recorded for our channel, most recently Nazareth's Confidências with Eleonora Perretta. Cramsie is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at the RCM in guitar and in theorbo, and holds a scholarship from the Julian Bream Trust. Her performances have taken her to the National Portrait Gallery, the Klara Festival and the Brussels Guitar Laboratory Festival.
Ingrid Horvei Lyslo
Ingrid Horvei Lyslo comes from Førde on the Norwegian west coast. After studying classical guitar at Firda High School she spent a year as an exchange student in Tokyo, then took her bachelor's degree in classical guitar and pedagogy at the University of Agder in Kristiansand from 2015.
She has performed solo and chamber music in Norway, Denmark, Japan, Belgium, Italy, Germany and France, and works in several ensembles alongside Duo Vona — among them the Franco-Norwegian guitar Trio Franor and a duo with the saxophonist Aina Helgeland Davidsen. She is also the artistic director of Gitarekspressen, a classical guitar concert series in Bergen, and in 2026 received a Norwegian Arts Council working grant for artists.
What the duo is for
Duo Vona draw on traditional music, classical repertoire, jazz and post-minimalism, and their stated focus is the breadth of what two guitars can actually sound like — the instrument as a medium of colour and sensitivity rather than display. Two aims run through the project: expanding the duo repertoire through their own arrangements and through commissions, and championing music by women composers.
That second aim matters more than it might appear. The guitar duo literature is small compared to the string quartet or piano duo repertoire, and it was assembled almost entirely by men. A duo that commissions deliberately is not just filling its own programmes — it is adding to what every future duo will have available.
Night Triptych by Golfam Khayam
For our channel they recorded Night Triptych by the Iranian composer Golfam Khayam — a work in three movements written for the American ensemble Duo Noire, who released it in 2018 on the album of the same name.
Khayam combines contemporary classical writing and sound art with the Persian music she grew up in, and her study of Persian plucked instruments has led her deep into extended techniques on the classical guitar: percussive strikes, scraping sounds, objects brought to the strings. The three movements move from an improvisatory opening through a furious central section to a closing movement of harmonics and drones. It is exactly the kind of piece Duo Vona exist to play — new, by a woman composer, and impossible to perform without rethinking what the instrument is.
The instruments
The duo play two very different guitars in this recording — a deliberate choice that keeps the two voices separable in a texture where they could easily merge. One is a Siccas Luthiers Creation Doubletop Triptych; the other a Coclea Thucea by Andrea Tacchi, the Florentine luthier whose Coclea models are among the most distinctive instruments built in Italy today.
There is a small coincidence in it: a piece called Night Triptych, played on a guitar called Triptych.
Discover more ensembles in our profiles of Duo Melis and the Amadeus Guitar Duo, hear the Molina Guitar Duo play Ponce, or browse all our profiles of great classical guitarists.
