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Sequeira Costa

Distinguished Professor of Piano

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In a career spanning five decades, Sequeira Costa has developed his own musical interpretation from an understanding of the German and French schools, acquired through studies with his master, Vianna da Motta (one of the last pupils of Liszt and Hans von Bulow), Mark Hamburg, Edwin Fischer, Marguerite Long, and Jacques Fevrier.

At age 22 Sequeira Costa won the "Grand Prix Ville de Paris" at the Marguerite Long International Music Competition in Paris. At age 27 he founded the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon. At age 28 he was invited by Shostakovich to sit on the jury of the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, to which he returned for six more editions.

Besides regular appearances as judge at some of the world's most prestigious international music competitions, including the Chopin, Leeds, Marguerite Long, Montreal, Rubenstein, and Tchaikovsky, Sequeira Costa teaches extensively in master classes worldwide. Since 1976, Sequeira Costa holds the position of "Cordelia Brown Murphy Distinguished Professor of Piano" at the University of Kansas, USA. Several of his students are prizewinners at international competitions, including Artur Pizarro, his student for 16 years, who won first prize gold medals at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in 1987, the Palm Beach Invitational in 1988, and the Harveys-Leeds in 1990 and now enjoys an international career and reputation himself.

Throughout his distinguished career, Sequeira Costa has performed at the greatest halls around the world including the Salle Gaveau and the Salle Pleyel in Paris, the Great Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, Leningrad's Philharmonic Hall, the Musikverein of Vienna, Tokyo's Suntory Hall, New York's Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the famous halls of London, among many others.

He has worked with such orchestras as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony, all BBC Orchestras, the Prague Symphony, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Bamberg Symphony, the Tokyo Metropolitan, the Japan Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony, and the Czech Philharmonic. Conductors with whom Sequeira Costa has worked include Paul Kletzki, Joseph Keilberth, Libor Pesek, David Zinman, Eduardo Mata, Dmitri Kitaenko, Maxim Shostakovich, Christopher Seaman, Walter Hendl, Martinon, Jorda, and Kurts. Sequeira Costa has partnered with such fellow artists as Itzhak Perlman, Henryk Szeryng, Elmar Oliveira, Igor Oistrach, Leonid Kogan, Simon Goldberg, Janos Starker, Tibor Varga, Maxim Amphiteatroff, Edwin Fischer, and Artur Pizarro.

Sequeira Costa's extensive discography includes solo piano music of Ravel, Chopin, Schumann, Albeniz, Bach/Busoni, Vianna da Motta, Rachmaninov, and a CD dedicated to a selection of encores. He recorded the complete works for piano and orchestra of Schumann, Rachmaninov and Chopin. His latest CD release consists of two-piano music by Spanish composers recorded with Artur Pizarro (on the Collins Classics label). Currently, Sequeira Costa is recording the 32 Sonatas of Beethoven.

Mr. Costa's recording of the "Concerto No. 3 in D minor" by Sergei Rachmaninoff with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Christopher Seaman, conductor) was recorded in 1993. The excerpt is from the third movement.