Music at the Valley
Gulbenkian Orchestra and Choir / Vale do Silêncio
In recent years, Gulbenkian Music has opened the doors to each new season with a free concert in the inspirational Vale do Silêncio. A celebration of profound complicity between the Gulbenkian Orchestra and the city of Lisbon and an outreach to new audiences in an informal context, based on the interpretation of hugely popular favourites. This time, the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Choir will join forces to perform a programme mainly focused on the orchestral and choral repertoire of opera and musicals
Performers
- Cesário Costa Conductor
- Violin
- Presenter
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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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Gulbenkian Orchestra
In 1962, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation decided to establish a permanent orchestral ensemble. Originally with only twelve musicians (strings and continuo) it was named “Orquestra de Câmara Gulbenkian”. This collective was successively enlarged and today the “Orquestra Gulbenkian” (the name it has adopted since 1971) has a permanent body of sixty instrumentalists, a number that can be expanded depending on the repertoire.
This structure allows the Gulbenkian Orchestra to interpret works from the Baroque and Classical periods, a significant part of 19th century orchestral literature and much of the music of the 20th century, including works belonging to the current repertoire of the traditional symphonic orchestras. In each season, the orchestra performs on a regular series of concerts at the Gulbenkian Grand Auditorium in Lisbon, where it has had the opportunity of working together with some of leading names of the world of music (conductors and soloists). It has also performed on numerous locations all over Portugal, in an effort to decentralize music and culture.
The orchestra has been constantly expanding its activities in the international level, performing in Europe, Asia Africa, and the Americas. In the recording field, Orquestra Gulbenkian is associated to labels as Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Hyperion, Teldec, Erato, Adès, Nimbus, Lyrinx, Naïve and Pentatone, among others, and this activity was recognized with several international prizes.
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Francisco Lima Santos
Violin
Born in Lisbon, he began his musical studies at the age of nine at the Fundação Musical dos Amigos das Crianças, under Ana Margarida Sanmarful. He finished his degree in violin at Lisbon Conservatory, where he studied with Khachatour Amirkhanian. He continued his studies at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels, under Yuzuko Horigome, first prize winner in the Queen Elizabeth Music Competition. He finished his studies in 2016 at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid, where he was a student of Ana Chumachenko and Zograb Tatevosyan. During his studies, he took masterclasses by Mauricio Fuks, Liviu Prunaru, Antje Weithaas, Veronika Hagen, Heime Muller, Pavel Gomziakov, Francesca Vicari and Krzysztof Wegrzyn. He was a member and scholarship holder of the Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil, of which he was a soloist, having also performed solo in various concert halls throughout Portugal. He has been a member of Orquestra XXI since its beginning. He was a member of the European Union Youth Orchestra, with whom he played in various important European venues.
He has won prizes in the violin category in various competitions during his studies, such as the Fundão International Competition, the José Augusto Alegria Prize and the Young Musicians Prize. In 2016, he won the Vasco Barbosa Prize and in that same year he performed solo with the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra at São Carlos National Theatre. He is a member of the Artium trio, the ensemble that won the Young Musicians Prize in 2016, in the Chamber Music category.
He has played with a number of orchestras in Europe, including the Euskadi Symphony, the Belgian National Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. He has regularly performed in the Cantabile Festival in chamber music concerts alongside soloists such as Diemut Poppen, Ivan Monigetti, Christel Lee and Barnabas Kelemen. He has been 1st Auxiliary Soloist of the Gulbenkian Orchestra since 2017.
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Cláudia Semedo
Presenter
Cláudia Semedo is an actress and television presenter. Born in Oeiras in 1983, she completed the Acting Course at Escola Profissional de Teatro de Cascais in 2001 and graduated in Journalism from Escola Superior de Comunicação Social in 2012.
She has been the president of Companhia de Atores and the artistic director of the Teatro Municipal Amélia Rey Colaço since January 2017.
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