{"id":205450,"date":"2015-12-02T15:11:06","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=205450"},"modified":"2015-12-02T15:11:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:11:06","slug":"from-pianos-to-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/from-pianos-to-research\/","title":{"rendered":"From Pianos to Research"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Monteiro,

Personal archives<\/span>Monteiro, during a master class at USP: academic activity means he practices the piano only in the eveningsPersonal archives<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Rio de Janeiro pianist Eduardo Monteiro speaks with satisfaction about his \u201ctroubled life.\u201d As a professor, concert pianist, and researcher, even he was surprised that he felt comfortable as head of the Department of Music at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (ECA-USP), a position he held in 2013. The administrative experience was so satisfying that Monteiro immediately accepted the post of vice director of the ECA, which he still holds. \u201cI only practice the piano at night and on weekends,\u201d he says. \u201cI can\u2019t study as hard as I used to when I was 20 or 25 but, on the other hand, experience helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most concert pianists, Monteiro began to play in early childhood. At 14 he already knew that piano would be his career. This was confirmed later when he won a series of awards in important competitions in Brazil and abroad. In 1989, at age 23, he was unanimously ranked in first place in the Cologne International Piano Competition, in Germany and also received the award as the best interpreter of Beethoven. Monteiro says this was a crucial point in his career. \u201cThat was when I realized that I might be able to do something in that field,\u201d he says, not without some irony since by that time he had already obtained his bachelor\u2019s degree in music from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and, strictly speaking, had never seriously thought about pursuing professional activity in any other field. Subsequently he earned a master\u2019s degree in Keyboard Instruments at UFRJ, a doctorate in History of Music and Musicology at the Paris-Sorbonne University\u2014his dissertation was on the works of Brazilian composer Henrique Oswald (1852-1931)\u2014and a two-year stay in the Artist Diploma program at the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston.<\/p>\n

\"Monteiro,

J\u00falio Acevedo<\/span>Monteiro, before a performance: on the horizon, five concerts and the recording of a CDJ\u00falio Acevedo<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Those two experiences, one in the area of research (the Sorbonne) and the other in performance (Boston), enabled the pianist to \u201cwrap up the concepts and think about how the piano should be played.\u201d In 2002, he began to give classes at the ECA. \u201cAt first it wasn\u2019t easy for me to fit into the university milieu,\u201d says Monteiro. \u201cWe are trained to give classes on the instrument. Very few people dedicate themselves to training researchers, but I began to realize that going deeper into that area could be extremely enriching.\u201d This does not mean that his performances in Brazil and abroad have become less frequent.<\/p>\n

Monteiro is conducting projects that study the interpretation of the piano repertoire. This means identifying and writing down the choices that pianists make when they perform a piece. \u201cWhat I\u2019m doing is formalizing the entire process of performance,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery note played is the result of a precise choice, a weighing of options\u2014which may not be obvious to someone who is not in the field\u2014and the combination of good choices made dictates the quality of the execution. This kind of reflection exists in every high-level performance, but is very seldom committed to writing anywhere.\u201d In Monteiro\u2019s first project conducted along those lines, from 2011 to 2012, the subject was the execution of Liszt\u2019s Sonata in B Minor. The study now in progress focuses on Beethoven\u2019s Piano Sonata No. 32, Opus 111, in C Minor.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Monteiro is researching Brazilian composers whose works are little known and even less well catalogued. \u201cI have an affinity with the repertoire; I feel very comfortable playing those composers,\u201d he says. In 2007, at a concert at Wigmore Hall in London, he launched Piano Music of Brazil<\/i><\/em>, a CD on the British label Meridian Records that features works by Brazilian romanticist, nationalist and 20th<\/sup> century authors, including an interpretation of Cartas Celestes vol. 1, <\/i><\/em>by Almeida Prado (1943-2010) that garnered high praise from music critics and from the composer himself. In 2013, Monteiro recorded both the Quintet<\/i><\/em> and the Quartet for piano and strings <\/i><\/em>by Henrique Oswald with the S\u00e3o Paulo Ensemble on the Lami label.<\/p>\n

Now Monteiro says it is time to research the works by Brazilian composer, conductor, and pianist Alexandre Levy (1864-1892), subject of an extension project begun in 2014 that calls for five concerts and the recording of a CD. The project is coordinated by Monteiro and Professor Luciana Sayure. The repertoire will be interpreted by undergraduate and graduate students from the Music Department at ECA. \u201cLevy\u2019s works are extremely important, because they were influenced by European romanticism and also contain elements that are precursors of the nationalist school,\u201d he says. \u201cEven so, this composer is very little known. His production was never published, recorded or studied.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also in 2014, Monteiro, in partnership with Luciana Sayure, organized and taught a piano workshop at USP. For a full week, about 100 people, including piano professors and students, some mere beginners, took turns attending private classes, master classes, concerts, and lectures in which the primary objective was to share practices and information. The idea was the brainchild of Monteiro\u2019s observation of the administration of specific skill tests given for admission to the Department of Music at ECA. \u201cSome applicants have obvious talent; they just have not had the right kind of training,\u201d says Monteiro, who intends to repeat the experiment in 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eduardo Monteiro successfully combines careers in music and academia ","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[248],"coauthors":[137],"class_list":["post-205450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205450"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=205450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}