UYMP offers huge congratulations to composer Luís Tinoco, who has been awarded the Pessoa Prize 2024, the most prestigious award in Portugal in the fields of the sciences and the arts. Named after Fernando Pessoa, the prize was initiated by the Expresso newspaper, sponsored by Caixa Geral de Depósitos, and aims to recognize Portuguese people who play a significant role in the country's cultural and scientific life.

This is just the third time in 38 years of the Pessoa Prize that a representative in the Music profession has been honoured. Only pianist Maria João Pires (1989) and composer Emanuel Nunes (2000) have preceded Luís Tinoco. The choice was welcomed by the Minister of Culture who, in a statement, recognized Tinoco's “commitment to teaching and training young musicians and his ability to project Portuguese musical creation across borders, with a unique and innovative artistic language.” Musicologist Rui Vieira Nery, one of the members of the jury, explained that they reached a firm consensus on Luís Tinoco as winner of the prize.

We are absolutely delighted that Dida Condria, a previous BBC Young Musician Keyboard Finalist, is performing two movements Labyrinth and Lizard from house composer, Sadie Harrison’s Impresa Amorosa at the Dublin International Piano Competition Irish Preliminary Competition on 20 December 2024. Dida and Sadie worked together on Labyrinth for the BBC Young Musician Competition in 2022 and we are thrilled that she continues to do so well on the public stage. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the National Concert Hall of Ireland, Casa Verdi Milan and the Sibiu Filarmonica and also on RTE Lyric FM. We wish her much luck in the forthcoming DIPC, now considered one of the world’s leading competitions.

A substantial new work by Thomas Simaku, Catena IV (for solo piano), will receive its world premiere at London’s most prestigious hall of chamber music, Wigmore Hall, on 2 January 2025. The piece is written for and dedicated to Danny Driver – celebrated British pianist, whose “most recent release of György Ligeti’s Piano Études has met with particular critical acclaim”.

This is Simaku’s fourth work in the Catena Cycle - the first three have been recorded by Joseph Houston and Dimitri Vassilakis, and released by BIS Records and NMC Recordings in 2000 and 2023 respectively. The overall formal structure of Catena IV consists of nine main sections and four interludes played without a break. The main sections are considered as self-contained units in a chain of events, which are linked by interludes and silences; in a nutshell, the work as a whole is in one movement lasting some 20 minutes. As Simaku writes in his programme note, “Focal points of the entire work are the 4th and 5th sections entitled Hommage à Chopin' and Hommage à Ligeti respectively. The first uses the exact notes of Chopin's opening motif from his Ballade No 1 in G-minor Op. 23. Although in a completely different stylistic environment, Chopin’s six different notes peacefully co-exist in a non-tonal canvas within the spectrum of total chromaticism.