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Details as performer
 António Chagas Rosa was born in Lisbon in 1960. In his home city, he studied Piano at the National Conservatory and obtained a degree in History at the New University. From 1984 and 1996, he lived in the Netherlands, where he obtained master degree in Contemporary Piano and Chamber Music Repertoire (Amsterdam, with Alexander Hrisanide) and in Composition (Rotterdam, with Klaas de Vries). He also worked as a repetiteur and assistant-conductor at the Dutch Opera House (Het Muziekthater) and taught for six years at the Sweelinck Conservatorium of Amsterdam. His composition output includes many song cycles, chamber music for large and small ensembles, various symphonic works, a concerto for piano and orchestra, two chamber operas, etc. His second opera - Strange Melodies -, upon a libretto by the Dutch writer Gerrit Komrij, was commissioned by the cities of Oporto and Rotterdam for the 2001 edition of the Cultural Capitals of Europe and was premiered at the City Theatre of Rotterdam in December 2001. In 2007, the Ensemble Musicatreize won a Victoire de la Musique (Radio France, Paris) for the recording of António Chagas Rosa’s musical tale Les Sorcières, upon an original dramatic poem by the Portuguese writer Maria Teresa Horta. His style is characterized by strong dramatic gestures, revealing close affiliations with cinema, theatre and cartoons. His works have been performed in a number of international contemporary music festivals such as The Encontros Gulbenkian (Lisboa), Wien Modern (Vienna), Ensems (Valencia), Festival Latino-Americano of Caracas (Venezuela),the Musikhochschule music festival of Zürich, the Vokaal Festivaal of Amsterdam, Musica of Strasbourg, etc. From 1996 on, he teaches Chamber Music at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, where he obtained his PhD in 2006 upon a thesis on the relationship between rhythm and semantics in Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. António Chagas Rosa, June 2012

Dossier no. 4 . Portuguese Composers of the 20th and 21st Centuries . António Chagas Rosa