Teresa Valente Pereira

Cellist Teresa Valente Pereira (b. 1982, in Lisbon) started studying cello at 6 with Maria José Falcão and completed with honours undergraduate studies with Paulo Gaio Lima. She got her post graduate diploma at the Reina Sofia School (Madrid) in the class of Natalia Shakovskaya and finished her studies doing a Konzertexam Diploma with Christoph Richter. Participated in various cello masterclasses with Xavier Gagnepain, Steve Doane, Miklós Peréyni, Natalia Gutman and others, and chamber music masterclasses with Walter Levin, Veronica Hagen and Erich Höbarth, among others. She was awarded several prizes and distinctions, among which the 1st prize of the Young Musicians Radio Award and the Estoril's International Competition. She played as a soloist and chamber musician in some of the most important music halls in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and Venezuela. Her performances with Hansjorg Schellenberger, Antoni Ros-Marbá, Ronald Zollman conducting the Gulbenkian, Portuguese Symphony, Oporto National and “Freixenet” Reina Sofia orchestras, were highly acclaimed. She participated in various national and international festivals. She was a member of Grupo Albéniz, performing regularly in Portugal and Spain. First solo recording was released in 2002 with pianist Bruno Belthoise, including the first recording ever of Armando José Fernandes’ Sonata for cello and piano. She also recorded for the Portuguese and the Spanish Classical Radios. She was a member of the EUYO Orchestra, working with Sir Colin Davis and playing at the Royal Albert Hall and the Philharmonie Berlin. She was Principal cello of the Lisbon Metropolitan and the Asturias Symphony and collaborates regularly with the Gulbenkian Orchestra. Currently she’s involved in a new chamber music project, Trio Pangea, with Bruno Belthoise and violinist Adolfo Carbajal. (adapted from text by Teresa Valente Pereira)

Armando José Fernandes

Armando José Fernandes was born in Lisbon, 1906. He took a degree in Engineering before having decided in 1924 to dedicate himself to music, an art form he had felt attracted to from an early age. He started his studies in 1927 at Lisbon's National Conservatory. Alexandre Rey Colaço and Lourenço Varela Cid (piano), Luís de Freitas Branco (Music Sciences) and António Eduardo da Costa Ferreira (Composition) were among his teachers. He finished the course in 1931 and was awarded the first prize in piano and also the Rodrigo da Fonseca Award. Between 1934 and 1937, with the sponsorship of the National Education Council, he developed his piano and composition studies in Paris with Alfred Cortot, Nadia Boulanger, Paul Dukas and Igor Stravinsky. Between 1940 and 1942, he taught Piano and Composition at the Music Amateurs Academy. From 1942 on he worked exclusively as a composer for the Musical Studies Department of the National Radio Broadcast Company. In 1953 he joined Lisbon's National Conservatory as a Composition teacher. He honourably retired from this position on his 70th birthday. Although his lineage, harmonically chromatic in the colours and formally neo-classic in spirit, denounces a cosmopolitan character, permeable both to the sensitivity of someone like Fauré as well as to the constructivism of someone like Hindemith, it also displays a certain kind of Portuguese inspiration, thanks to the likely search for motivation in Portuguese popular themes. He received the composition awards Moreira de Sá (Porto, Orpheon Portuense, 1944) and Círculo de Cultura Musical (Lisbon, 1946). He died in Lisbon in 1983. (photo and text from PMIC - Based on the biography included in the Catálogo Geral da Música Portuguesae, organized by Humberto d'Ávila).

António Rosado

Pianist António Rosado began studying music when the was 3 years old, with his father, and graduated at the Lisbon National Conservatoire with the highest classifications. When he was 16 he went to study in Paris, where he had classes with Aldo Ciccolini, his tutor for several years, who said, about him: “António Rosado has something that cannot be taught or learned: the sense of the keyboard.” His virtuosity made him win international prizes such as the Alfredo Casella Competition and the Perosi International Academy’s G. Pella Prize. Those achievements helped establish a notorious career which throughout the years lead him to play many concerts and festivals all over the world, solo or with prestigious orchestras and conductors. He has been invited to play and record for TV and radio stations in many countries. His discography includes CDs dedicated to Enescu, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Mozart, Schumann and the Portuguese composers José Viana da Mota, Fernando Lopes-Graça, Luís de Freitas Branco and Armando José Fernandes. In 2008, António Rosado was decorated Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.

Available discography.

António Rosado plays Fernando Lopes-Graça's Piano Sonata No. 2, 2nd movement.