The Boccherini work, Isbin says, “is a really delightful three-movement work that ends with a wonderful dance, a very fiery fandango, which was considered racy back in the 18th century. It’s very rhythmic and exciting.”

In addition to a collection of Romanian folk dances by Bela Bartok and Ernesto Halffter’s Sinfonietta, Isbin will also present Joaquin Rodrigo’s dance-filled Fantasía para un Gentilhombre, a “vividly depicted portrayal of musical sunshine” as Classic FM put it.

“It harks back to the past with a voice of the present,” Isbin says. The Spanish composer’s second most famous piece, after the exuberant Concierto de Aranjuez, was written in 1954 for guitarist Andres Segovia, the Spanish master who mentored Isbin in her own early career.

Speaking over the phone from New York, where she lives and works when not on tour, the 63-year-old was still riding high after being named the 2020 Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America Worldwide, one of the most prominent awards in the classical music world. In a career studded with firsts, Isbin is the only guitarist to have ever received the award.

She also became the first classical guitar player in 28 years to win a Grammy in 2001, and is still the only woman to have done so, before adding another two in 2002 and 2010, with a further three nominations.

There was no guitar programme at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School until Isbin created one in 1989. As she celebrates its 30th anniversary, she still coaches budding players there.

She has performed at the White House for the Obamas, at the memorial tribute at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and was featured on the soundtrack of the multiple Oscar-winning film The Departed. Ticking off concert halls from Jerusalem to Bermuda, she has performed across the world many times over, appearing as a soloist with nearly 200 orchestras.

“There have been a lot of firsts,” she says. “And each time it helps to reinforce the stature, prominence and importance of the instrument.”

While acoustic and electric guitars are ubiquitous and instantly recognisable throughout popular music, the classical guitar – with its nylon strings and players’ slightly awkward, open-legged sitting position – is less well understood. Isbin has worked hard to push the instrument further into the mainstream, through collaborations with rock musicians such as Steve Vai and Heart’s Nancy Wilson.

A stereotypically male instrument, the guitar’s popularity among women is something Isbin has long championed, and throughout a prolific career in which she has pushed back against the sexism female musicians sometimes face, she has inspired a new generation of players.

“In the guitar world, I always had to fight as a woman, and in the music world, I always had to fight as a guitarist,” she says in her 2014 documentary, Troubadour.

Though most of her students at Juilliard are still men, with very little change in her programme’s intake of American students over the years, she has witnessed greater interest from female guitarists from Europe and Asia.

“My female students over the years have all been from foreign countries,” Isbin says. “I think that’s because in this country the guitar is still connected to the rock world, and that’s primarily a male thing.”

Although imbalances still exist across women’s representation within popular music – such as male-heavy festival line-ups – female guitarists are more celebrated and visible in 2019 than ever before, with musicians such as St Vincent, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell and Taylor Swift all credited with having inspired more women to venture into guitar showrooms.

The classical world, however, is taking time to catch up, with few women reaching an elite level, and fewer still reaching Isbin’s level of fame.

She was born in the northern US state of Minnesota to a lawyer mother and a nuclear scientist father, who moved the family to Italy for a year due to his work. While there, a nine-year-old Isbin began playing classical guitar, which initially came second to her love of building rockets and launching them into space.

Growing up, Isbin and her two brothers were encouraged to follow their passion, and Isbin was told she could keep firing insects into the air if she put in her practice on the guitar.

“It was a very natural experience for me to want to do anything boys could do, so for me I rebelled against any possibility of gender restrictions. And my parents were very supportive in that,” she says.

Things became serious when, aged 14, she won a competition to perform for 10,000 people with the Minnesota Orchestra. “I suddenly realised in that moment on stage that this was even more thrilling than sending my little worms and grasshoppers up into space. So I switched gears and began devoting myself to practice.”

Isbin continues to expand her repertoire through collaborations, including an upcoming album with the Indian sarod player Amjad Ali Khan, due for release next year. She puts this down to an unpretentious, can-do attitude.

“I say yes to projects before I have any idea how I’ll make it work. But I devote myself 1,000 per cent to making anything I do as in-depth and beautiful as possible,” she says.

HK Phil named 2019 Orchestra of the Year by Gramophone magazine

Isbin’s adolescent interests would come full circle in 1995, when, a year after her inaugural concert in Hong Kong, one of her CDs was blasted into orbit on board the space shuttle Atlantis, along with a travel guitar she endorsed, to be presented to Russian Cosmonauts by their American counterparts.

“I realised I actually did make it up into space after all,” she says, with a laugh. It’s somehow fitting for a musician whose career has been nothing short of stratospheric.

Sharon Isbin + CCOHK, November 1, 2019, 8pm, Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall