Azevedo, Sergio - Ave Maria

Sérgio Azevedo was born in Coimbra in 1968. He studied composition at the Academia de Amadores de Música (Lisbon) with composer Fernando Lopes-Graça, and finished his studies of composition at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, with Christopher Bochmann (a disciple of the mythic Nadia Boulanger) and Constança Capdeville. Azevedo followed several seminars at IRCAM and other institutions, and worked in short periods with composers like Emmanuel Nunes (at the Gulbenkian Foundation), Tristan Murail, Phillipe Manoury, Luca Francesconi, Mary Finsterer, Jorge Peixinho, Louis Andriessen and Simon Bainbridge. Azevedo won several prizes of composition, in Portugal and abroad (like the United Nations Prize), and his works have been played and commissioned regularly in several countries (Spain, France, United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Brasil, Colombia, Canada, USA, Italy, etc) by prestigious ensembles, soloists and conductors (Luca Pfaff, Pascal Roffé, Jürgen Bruns, Nikolai Lalov, Brian Schembri, Fabian Panisello, Bruno Belthoise, Aline Czerny, Lorraine Vaillancourt, Artur Pizarro, António Rosado, Miguel Borges Coelho, Anne Kaasa, Marc Foster, Jose Ramon Encinar, Brian Schembri, Ronald Corp, Galliard Ensemble, Proyecto Gerhard, Le Concert Impromptu, Remix Ensemble, Ensemble Télémaque, Plural Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Kammersymphonie Berlin, etc), some of them being available in commercial CD's. Azevedo works frequently with schools and students, composing a great deal of didactic pieces, ranging from piano solo to small ensembles and school orchestras. He is also a prolific writer on music, with two books published, Inventing Sounds (Caminho 1999) and Olga Prats - Um Piano Singular (Bizâncio 2007) and several articles. He also contributes to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and works for other prestigious magazines and CD labels. In 1993 Azevedo was appointed teacher of composition at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. He was also author of broadcastings at RDP - Antena 2 and member of the CESEM, Center for Aesthetic and Music Studies from 1993 to 2007. In 2007 Azevedo begun his doctorate degree at Universidade do Minho with Elisa Lessa and Christopher Bochmann. His music is published by AVA - Editions (www.editions-ava.com).