Gulbenkian Choir at São Roque
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Date
- / Cancelled / Sold out
Location
Igreja de S. Roque Largo Trindade Coelho, Lisbon- Direction
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Gulbenkian Choir
Coro Gulbenkian was founded in 1964 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as a full symphonic body of around 100 singers. The choir joins the Orquestra Gulbenkian and other orchestras to perform Classical, Romantic and Contemporary choral-symphonic repertoire, but can also perform a cappella. It has performed – and often premiered – many 20th century works by Portuguese and international composers.
Coro Gulbenkian has been invited to collaborate with major international orchestras, under the direction of conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Colin Davis, John Nelson, Emmanuel Krivine, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Frans Brüggen, Franz Welser-Möst, Gerd Albrecht, Michael Gielen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, René Jacobs and Leonard Slatkin, among others.
Besides its regular season of concerts in Lisbon and frequent national tours, Coro Gulbenkian has repeatedly toured Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Macao, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Uruguay.
Coro Gulbenkian has recorded extensively for Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Erato, Cascavelle, Musifrance, as well as FNAC-Music, performing a wide range of repertoire, from Early-Renaissance polyphony to Xenakis. Several of these albums received international awards.
Michel Corboz was the Principal Conductor between 1969 and 2019. Jorge Matta and Inês Tavares Lopes are currently the Associate and Assistant conductors, respectively.
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Inês Tavares Lopes
Associate Conductor
Inês Tavares Lopes has a master’s degree in Choral Conducting from the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, where she studied choral conducting under Paulo Lourenço, Eugene Rogers, Cara Tasher, Stephen Coker and Brett Scott and singing under Isabel Alcobia, Ângela Silva, Joana Nascimento, Geert Berghs, Jill Feldman and Rita Marques.
She taught at the Conservatório de Música and Escola Profissional da Metropolitana, as well as the Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra, from 2011 to 2017. From 2015 to 2017, she held the position of monitor at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, where she taught choir, choral conducting techniques, vocal technique, and vocal and instrumental ensembles.
She was a founding conductor of the Ensemble Vocal Desafinados (2012) and Coro Juvenil da AMAL (2017), and also a member of the Tenso Europe Chamber Choir in 2013 and 2014. Between 2013 and 2019, she was part of the Gulbenkian Choir, where she also conducted rehearsals.
As a singer, she takes part in projects with the Officium Ensemble, Voces Caelestes, Ludovice Ensemble, Capella Patriarchal, ensemble mpmp, ECCE Ensemble, Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa and Polyphonos Ensemble. In 2020, she became artistic director for the Ensemble Vocal Aura, a project exclusively dedicated to female voices. In January 2024, she took up the position of Associate Conductor of the Gulbenkian Choir.
Francis Poulenc
Frank Martin
Samuel Barber
Miguel Jesus
The emotional intensity that Samuel Barber put into his Adagio for Strings catapulted this composition into the work of choice for moments of national mourning in the United States: it accompanied the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and was played during both John F. Kennedy’s and Albert Einstein’s funeral ceremonies. Thirty years after the original composition, Barber adapted the piece for the choral version Agnus Dei, work that will be presented at the traditional New Year’s Eve concert by the Gulbenkian Choir at the Church of São Roque, alongside sacred works by Poulenc, Frank Martin and Miguel Jesus.
Sponsor Gulbenkian Music
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.