Born on November 9, 1990, in Lisbon, he began studying piano at the age of four. At the age of eight, he entered the Music School of the National Conservatory, where he completed the complementary piano course with the highest classification in July 2009.
For the first seven years, he was a pupil of Hélder Entrudo, later studying with Carla Seixas. At the Conservatory, he worked with Eli Camargo Jr., Armando Vidal, Paulo Jorge Ferreira and Anna Tomasik. He also attended an annual production course under Eli Camargo Jr., which would have a major influence on his musical activity. He took part in various master classes with Paulo Gaio Lima, Manuela Gouveia, Constantin Sandu, Pavel Gomziakov, Olga Prats, João Paulo Santos and José Eduardo Martins.
He has a degree in Piano from the Lisbon School of Music (ESML), in the class of Jorge Moyano, having worked, among others, with Irene Lima, Miguel Henriques and Paulo Pacheco.
A prizewinner in several national competitions, he regularly performs throughout the country, both solo and in eclectic chamber music groups. In this panorama, the importance given to the works of Portuguese composers is noteworthy, having already presented several unpublished works and premieres by composers such as João Pedro Oliveira or Sérgio Azevedo.
This year's highlights include performances in Lisbon, Porto, Estoril, Viseu, Braga and Paris, as well as a tour of Brazil. At the invitation of ESML, he recorded works by Claude Debussy and Luiz de Freitas Branco for Antena2, with soprano Ana Tomás and tenor Carlos Monteiro. He also recorded a recital in homage to Guilhermina Suggia, included in the Music Museum's Cycle of Historical Instruments, with cellist Nuno Cardoso - with whom he maintains a regular duo - using the Lockey Hill cello that belonged to the Portuguese cellist and Luiz de Freitas Branco's Bechstein piano.
He is a founding member of mpmp, the patrimonial movement for Portuguese music, an association where he is currently vice-president and artistic director of the concert season, which has already held over a hundred events in just three years, in Portugal and abroad. He is also a member of the editorial board of Glosas, collaborating with interviews, various articles and criticism.
He produced and is the artistic director of the unprecedented complete keyboard works by Carlos Seixas for the MPMP's melographia portugueza collection, with José Carlos Araújo as the performer, as well as the project to record the complete sonatas by João Domingos Bomtempo, with pianist Philippe Marques. Last March, he took part in the association's tour of Brazil, presenting seven concerts and a lecture on the international circulation of Portuguese-language music in various Brazilian cities.
He has been teaching piano since 2009 at various schools, including the Cascais and Oeiras Conservatory. At the Salesian College in Lisbon, where he was awarded numerous prizes for his good academic performance, he completed his secondary education on a merit and excellence scholarship.
Alongside his musical career, he is studying for an integrated master's degree in Physical Engineering Technology at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon.
José Carlos Araújo | Cravo
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José Carlos Araújo She studied harpsichord, organ, basso continuo and early music performance at the National Conservatoire, under the guidance of Cândida Matos and Rui Paiva, and went on to further her training at numerous seminars, which allowed her to benefit from contact with personalities such as Cremilde Rosado Fernandes, Gustav Leonhardt, Jacques Ogg, Rinaldo Alessandrini, José Luis Uriol, Ketil Haugsand, Miklós Spániy, Roël Dieltiens and Maurice Steger. In 2004 he won the First Prize and the Audience Prize at the Carlos Seixas Competition, awarded by the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa and the Sociedade Histórica da Independência de Portugal, in celebration of the composer's tricentenary.
He regularly performs in harpsichord, pianoforte and organ recitals, and has focused his work especially on historical instruments, with programs that seek to privilege keyboard music by Iberian authors from the 16th to 18th centuries. At the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, he presented the inaugural concerts, after restorations, of two historic pianos from the National Conservatory's collection. Also as a result of a collaboration with the Music Museum that began in 2011, he has given public performances of the 1758 Antunes harpsichord (National Treasure), to which he has dedicated several recordings, in a series of recitals accompanied by a maintenance program. In the same context, he was responsible for the concert commemorating the 250th anniversary of the construction of Henrique van Casteel's pianoforte (1763), of which he made the only complete recording on CD.
He collaborated with Teatro da Cornucópia in the production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Luís Miguel Cintra. He has recorded for RTP and RDP (Antena 2) and in 2008 RTP2 dedicated a documentary to his artistic activity.
He collaborated with the artist Teresa Gonçalves Lobo on the project One Hundred Years of the Republic.
He graduated from the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon, where he studied Classical Philology, and was distinguished as the student with the highest marks at this institution in 2007. A researcher at the Center for Classical Studies at the University of Lisbon, he has collaborated with the Lexikon project to produce a dictionary of classical Greek, in the writing of a new Dictionary of Latin Literature and has dedicated himself to the translation of ancient authors such as Pliny (Epistulae), Diogenes Laertius (Vitae Philosophorum) and, in partnership, Lucan (Pharsalia) and Valerius Maximus (Facta et Dicta Memorabilia).
He has published studies on Classical Philology and presented papers at Classical and Comparative Studies congresses. He is a regular contributor to Euphrosyne - Revista de Filologia Clássica.
In 2012, the melographia portugueza record collection was inaugurated, published by mpmp - movimento patrimonial pela música portuguesa, with the first CD' s of the complete recording of Carlos Seixas' keyboard works, of which 14 volumes are planned. This project, supported by the Directorate-General for the Arts and carried out for the first time, also includes the public presentation of all the composer's sonatas and includes recordings of important Portuguese historical instruments.
He has also collaborated in the direction and musical assistance of various record editions. He is a member of the editorial board of Glosas magazine, a publication dedicated to Portuguese musical heritage and Lusophone culture, of which he is currently co-director.
