PORTUGUESE PIANO MUSIC

Sofia Lourenço was born in Oporto, where she completed graduate studies at the Conservatory and University. From the age of ten she was a pupil of Helena Sá e Costa and was also guided by several distinguished pianists, including Sequeira Costa, Vitaly Margulis and Alicia de Larrocha. She obtained a Soloist Diploma at the Berlin Universität der Künste and was awarded a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship. She has been a professor at the Escola de Música e das Artes do Espetáculo do Oporto since 1991. She enjoys an active career as a performer in Portugal and abroad, with a number of recordings to her credit.

Daddi’s own compositional output consists primarily of sacred works and music for the stage, but also includes a number of virtuosic piano pieces published by Sassetti, most of which were fantasies on themes from operas by Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi, or stylised waltzes and other dances, all of which were clearly designed as vehicles to showcase his own technical expertise as a pianist.

Born in the Portuguese African colony of São Tomé, José Viana da Mota (1868–1948) started out as a child prodigy, performing on the piano at the age of six for Fernando II, a prince of Saxe-Coburg. Viana da Mota achieved worldwide recognition as one of the leading exponents of the Lisztian piano school, both as a concert soloist and as a chamber musician collaborating with such distinguished partners as fellow pianist Ferruccio Busoni, violinist Pablo Sarasate and soprano Marcella Sembrich. He also enjoyed a brilliant teaching career at both the Berlin and Geneva conservatories, and in 1917 the Portuguese government appointed him head of a committee charged with reforming the teaching programme and methods of the the Lisbon Conservatory, of which he then became Director two years later. For the next three decades he was responsible for training several of the most acclaimed Portuguese pianists of the generations.