Mattias Schulstad

Guitarist Mattias Schulstad was concertizing by his late teens and has appeared in Spain and the U.S. as well as in his native Sweden. He has said that he is inspired musically by pianists Artur Rubinstein and Alicia de Larrocha and singers Jussi Björling and Victoria de los Angeles, as well as by guitarists. Schulstad was born in the Stockholm area on November 8, 1984. As a child, he admired the playing of guitarist Göran Söllscher, and he enrolled in guitar studies at the Nacka Municipal School of Music. He remained as a student there from 1994 to 2003, studying with Erik Möllerström. This teacher bequeathed to his student a 1971 Ignacio Fleta e hijos guitar; Schulstad considers Fleta the Stradivarius of the guitar and keeps the instrument in a space with two humidifiers running at all times. At 15, Schulstad matriculated at the Södra Latins Gymnasium high school, where he studied with Bo Hansson. Two years later, he made his recital debut at the Stockholm International Guitar Festival. While there, he realized that he could study with Söllscher himself, and in 2003, he enrolled for that purpose at the Malmö Academy of Music, a unit of the University of Lund. He went on for further studies at the Juilliard School in New York, and since then, he has often appeared in the U.S. In 2012, Schulstad released his debut album, Invocación. Among Schulstad's appearances in Sweden was one at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. He has been heard on Televisión Española in Spain and on the Performance Today program on U.S. National Public Radio, as well as on WQXR radio in New York and WFMT in Chicago. Schulstad has appeared at festivals, including Music at Lake Siljan and the Uppsala International Guitar Festival in Sweden, as well as the large Strathmore complex outside Washington, D.C. He has amassed a large following on an online streaming video service. A supporter of contemporary music, he has premiered concertos by Jakub Ciupiński and Ryan Francis and gave the North American and Nordic premieres of Mexican composer Enrico Chapela Barbas' Melate Binario. Schulstad released several singles featuring landmarks of the guitar repertory before returning with his sophomore album, The Guitar Player, in 2023.
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