Luísa Tender

Pianist Luísa Tender was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1977. She had her first piano lessons at the age of four. After graduating from Escola Superior de Música in Porto as a pupil of Pedro Burmester, she continued her musical studies with Vitaly Margulis in Los Angeles and Irina Zaritskaya at the Royal College of Music in London. She was awarded the degree of Master of Music in Performance Studies from the Royal College of Music in 2002. She undertook further piano study with Artur Pizarro in Brighton in 2003, and in 2004 she was awarded the Diplôme Superieur d’Exécution from the École Normale de Musique in Paris, as a student of Marian Rybicki. In recent years, she has given solo and chamber music recitals in most of the main Portuguese concert halls and international music festivals, together with performances in Spain, Holland, Italy, Cyprus and Brazil. She has recorded solo and chamber works by Scarlatti, Brahms, Prokofiev and Berg for the Portuguese national broadcast. A recent review of her all-Schubert recital in Matosinhos in 2003 referred to her playing as ‘very moving, whilst never losing attention to details’, whilst her Sintra International Festival recital in 2004 was praised for its ‘lovely freshness’. She’s been the recipient of a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and a study support grant from the Royal College of Music. She is currently a professor of music at Escola Superior de Artes Aplicadas (ESART) in Castelo Branco, where she teaches Music Analysis and Chamber Music. (adapted from text by Luísa Tender)

Discography