JURY

Artur Pizarro – Jury Chairman 

Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1968, Artur Pizarro gave his first public performance at the age of three and made his television début on Portuguese television at the age of four. He had been introduced to the instrument by his maternal grandmother, pianist Berta da Nóbrega, and her piano-duo partner, Campos Coelho who was a student of Vianna da Motta, Ricardo Viñes and Isidor Philipp. From 1974 to 1990 Artur studied with Sequeira Costa who had also been a student of Vianna da Motta and of Mark Hamburg, Edwin Fischer, Marguerite Long and Jacques Février. This distinguished lineage immersed Artur in the tradition of the ‘Golden Age’ of pianism and gave him a broad education in both the German and French piano schools and repertoire. During a brief interruption of his studies in the USA, Artur also studied with Jorge Moyano in Lisbon, and in Paris worked with Aldo Ciccolini, Géry Moutier and Bruno Rigutto.

Artur won first prizes in the 1987 Vianna da Motta Competition, the 1988 Greater Palm Beach Symphony Competition and won first prize at the 1990 Leeds International Pianoforte Competition, which marked the beginning of an international concert career.

Artur Pizarro performs internationally in recital, chamber music and with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Philippe Entremont, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Sir Andrew Davis, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yuri Temirkanov, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Ilan Volkov, Franz Welser- Most, Tugan Sokhiev, Yakov Kreizberg, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Libor Pešek, Vladimir Jurowski, Ion Marin, John Wilson and the late Sir Charles Mackerras.

Artur is an active chamber musician and has performed at chamber music festivals throughout the world. Artur Pizarro has recorded extensively for Collins Classics, Hyperion Records, Linn Records, Brilliant Classics, Klara, Naxos, Danacord, Odradek Records and Phoenix Edition.

Artur Pizarro has received various awards from his native Portugal for services to classical music and culture including the Portuguese Press Award, the Portuguese Society of Authors award, the Medal of Culture of the City of Funchal and the Medal of Cultural Merit from the Portuguese Government.

Artur Pizarro has created his private teaching studio in Oeiras, Portugal where he coaches students of various ages and levels.

Tiago Nunes – OPC Director

Tiago Nunes, from Coimbra, soon showed passion and aptitude for the world of music, having started studying piano at an early age, at the Conservatory of Music in Seia, where he completed the Basic Course. Later, he attended the Complementary Piano Course at the Conservatório de Música de Coimbra, in the class of professor Rita Dourado, having finished it with a high and distinct classification.

Always seeking growth and improvement, he has participated in several masterclasses by several pianists, including: Aquilles Delle Vigne (Argentina / Belgium), Fausto Neves (Portugal), Álvaro Teixeira Lopes (Portugal), Paulo Oliveira (Portugal), Luísa Tender (Portugal), Nancy Lee Harper (USA / Portugal), Paul Badura-Skoda (Austria), Rudolfo Rubino (Italy), Shao Ling (China), Yi Wu (China / USA), among others. He completed his degree in piano performance under the guidance of the pianist Fausto Neves. His career contemplates several prizes, distinctions and solo recitals throughout Europe.

Since the beginning of 2015, he has been the artistic director of the Coimbra Concert Cycle, that takes place in March in the city of Coimbra, having, this year, its fifth edition. Two years later, became founder and president of the CulturXis Artistic Association. He has been the director of the Oeiras Piano Competition since its foundation. In his activity as a professor, he has more than 20 students awarded in national and international competitions. Since 2017, he has been teaching and coordinating the piano department at the Montijo Conservatory of Arts. In 2020, with the pianist António Luís Silva, created a new project: the H4NDS Duo and recorded their first album.

António Rosado

António Rosado is “performer who dominates what he does. He has both emotion and poetry,  as well  color and taste” in Diapason Magazine. Rosado is a nationally and internationally recognized pianist, result of his talent and taste for diversity, expressed in an extensive piano repertoire that includes works by composers as diverse as Georges Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Isaac Albéniz and Franz Liszt. This versatility allowed him to present for the first time in Portugal, outstanding works as the Sonatas of G. Enescu or the Paraphrases of F. Liszt, being the first Portuguese pianist to perform the complete Preludes and Etudes of Claude Debussy. Also about his recitals can be underlined the interpretation of the complete Mozart and Beethoven Piano Sonatas.

Rosado has performed on stage for the first time at four years of age. His musical studies started with his father, and continued at the National Conservatory of Music in Lisbon, where he finished the Piano Superior course, with the highest qualification. At sixteen Rosado left for Paris, and there he came to be a disciple of Aldo Ciccolini at the Music Conservatory and further training took place at Siena and Biella (Italy).

In 1980, took place is debut in concert with the Orchestre National de Toulouse, under the direction of Michel Plasson and since then Rosado has played with numerous international orchestras and notable conductors such as Georg Alexander Albrecht, Moshe Atzmon, Franco Caracciolo, Pierre Dervaux, Arthur Fagen, Leon Fleischer, Silva Pereira, Claudio Scimone, David Stahl, Marc Tardue and Ronald Zollman.

In chamber music he has performed with prestigious musicians such as Aldo Ciccolini, Maurice Gendron, Margarita Zimermann, Gerardo Ribeiro and Paulo Gaio Lima, with whom he played Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano.

Laureate by Maurice Ravel International Academy and the International Academy Perosi, António Rosado was distinguished by the Vianna da Motta International Competition and the International Competition Alfredo Casella in Naples. These awards are the international recognition of his virtuosity and the impetus for a brilliant career, with performing recitals and concerts throughout the world, and participation in various festivals. In the 90s, he was the pianist chosen by TF1 for the recording and transmission of three programs – Spanish and Portuguese music, Liszt and, finally, a recital with music by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Wagner-Liszt.

His first recording was in the 80s, took place in Paris and was dedicated to Enescu. Other albums followed, including the piano works by Vianna da Motta; a commemorative CD of the 150th anniversary of Liszt’s visit to Lisbon; Fantasie by Schumann and Liszt’s Sonata. With violinist Gerardo Ribeiro, Rosado recorded the violin and piano sonatas by Brahms and with the pianist Artur Pizarro, a disc entitled Mozart in Norway. With the NDR Sinfonieorchestra Hamburg, recorded the Concerto No. 2 and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninov. In Portugal recorded the two Brahms Concertos with the National Orchestra of Porto, in 2004 all the piano sonatas by Fernando Lopes-Graça and in 2006 the eight suites “In Memoriam Bela Bartok” by the same composer. More recently the Preludes of Armando José Fernandes and Luís de Freitas Branco and, in 2012, Festive Music of Fernando Lopes-Graça. In 2016 was released by Calanda Music, the disc with all Preludes by C. Debussy.António Rosado holds the prestigious título of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (French Government, 2007). 

Luís Duarte

Robert Andres

The Croatian/Portuguese pianist Robert Andres graduated from the Zagreb Music Academy and subsequently received a scholarship from the Soviet government to study at the St.  Petersburg Conservatory with D. A. Svetozarov, a pupil of the great Russian pianist Sofronitski. He continued his studies in Vienna and in the United States where, as a Fulbright scholarship recipient, he studied at the University of Kansas with renowned Portuguese/American pianist Sequeira Costa and earned there a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano, as well as a master’s degree in musicology. He has also received valuable advice from renowned pianists, such as Pierre Sancan, Rudolf Kehrer, Claude Frank, Leonid Brumberg and Peter Katin.

Andres has performed in recitals, with orchestras, and in chamber music concerts in many European countries as well as in Venezuela and the United States. He has collaborated with artists such as Chiara Isotton, Artur Pizarro, Lorenzo Di Bella, Grigori Zhislin, Zakhar Bron, Anatoli Melnikov and Dejan Ivanovic. The piano duo with his wife, the Irish pianist Honor O’Hea, has, since 1995, met with enthusiastic response from critics and audiences alike.

After teaching at the Kalamazoo College in Michigan, U. S. A., since 1993 he has taught at the Madeira Conservatory – School of Arts, where he is at present a tenured professor of piano and coordinator of the keyboard department.

He has been on juries of more than twenty international piano competitions and regularly gives masterclasses. Since 1997 he has been Managing and Artistic Director of the Association of the Friends of the Conservatory and is also the Artistic Director of Madeira PianoFest. 

Having developed an intense activity as a writer and lecturer on musical topics, Andres has contributed to various prestigious music journals, encyclopaedias and magazines in several countries. In 2001 the Scarecrow Press (U.S.A.) published his book on the beginnings of the scientific approach to piano technique. He is an integrated researcher of INET-md (Institute of Ethnomusicology – Studies of Music and Dance) of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova in Lisbon. In 2020 he revised and edited the first volume of music for piano of the Anthology of Music in Madeira, and last year he recorded a CD of piano music written in Madeira in the 19^th century.