Dale Kavanagh

Dale Kavanagh, born in 1958 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, is a guitarist who has built the greater part of her career in Germany and earned particular recognition for her work in chamber settings.

She began piano studies at five and added the clarinet soon afterward; from the age of ten she took up steel-string and electric jazz guitars along with the mandolin before eventually concentrating on the classical instrument. Her academic path took her first to Acadia University and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, then to the University of Toronto for specialized guitar training, and finally to the Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel in Switzerland, where she worked with Oscar Ghiglia. While there she participated in master classes that extended well beyond guitar repertoire, among them sessions with the Juilliard and Emerson String Quartets as well as composer John Cage.

Kavanagh’s engagement with contemporary music has remained constant; she has been the dedicatee of numerous new guitar compositions, several of them concertos, by Stephen Dodgson, Stephen Funk Pearson, and Bruce Shavers. As a soloist she has appeared with the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, and the Prague Chamber Orchestra, among many other ensembles. She is best known, however, as one member of the Amadeus Guitar Duo alongside her husband, Thomas Kirchhoff, with whom she has performed in more than forty countries.

Her extensive solo discography on the Hänssler label began with the 1998 release 20th Century Variations; during the 2010s she shifted her recording activity to Naxos, where many projects have centered on twentieth-century repertoire. In 2019 she issued Dale Kavanagh plays Rodrigo on that label. She has also composed and recorded several works for solo guitar. Since 1999 she has taught at the Detmold University of Music and has conducted master classes at Acadia University, her undergraduate alma mater.