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Eurico Carrapatoso wins the DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble 2021 Prize for Composers
Considered as one of the most relevant Portuguese composers today, Eurico Carrapatoso has a wide catalog that includes symphonic works, operas, chamber music for various formations and choral music. Since 1989, he has been a professor of Composition at the Lisbon National Conservatory. Carrapatoso regularly receives commissions from national and foreign institutions and his work has been performed, edited and disseminated, since 1992, in Europe and other continents. His music represented Portugal three times in the UNESCO International Tribune of Composers held in Paris in 1998, 1999 and 2006. He was distinguished on several occasions, having won the Portuguese Society of Authors Prize in 2017 and the first editions of the Lopes-Graça Composition Prize (1997), the Francisco de Lacerda Prize (1999) and the Jesús García-Bernalt Prize from the University of Salamanca (2021). In 2004, he was named as Commander of the Order of Infante Dom Henrique by the President of the Republic of Portugal.
The DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble Composition Award aims to recognize, encourage and publicize contemporary Portuguese classical musical creation. It is intended to award biennially the work and path of merit of a Portuguese composer of reference. Awarded by the DSCH – Schostakovich Ensemble, it is the biggest Composition Award existing in Portugal, in the amount of €5,000, and has the support of the Ministry of Culture. In 2019, in its first edition, the DSCH – Shostakovich Composition Prize was awarded to composer Luís Tinoco.
The DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble is currently considered one of the top ensembles on the international scene. Based in Lisbon since its foundation, in 2006, by pianist and artistic director Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro, DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble is formed by internationally renowned musicians and has released albums dedicated to Shostakovich and Beethoven - edited by the French label Paraty and distributed by Harmonia Mundi PIAS - which have been receiving high distinctions from national and international specialized critics.
The DSCH – Schostakovich Ensemble 2021 Composition Award will be presented to Eurico Carrapatoso at the next DSCH – Schostakovich Ensemble concert at Centro Cultural de Belém, on November 28, 2021.
The concert is entitled “The Beginning and the End of Time” and will be presented by the DSCH – Schostakovich Ensemble – formed by Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro, Pascal Moraguès, Esther Hoppe and Christian Poltéra – with three works dedicated to the fascinating theme of “time”: Olivier Messiaen's famous “Quartet for the End of Time”, one of the most iconic works of the 20th century, composed and premiered in a Nazi prison camp, against the backdrop of the horrors and tragedies of the 2nd World War and the hope of to overcome this apocalyptic “time”; “Círculo”, the opus 91 of the Spanish composer Joaquín Turina, also nicknamed “Trio Fantástico” and which reflects the “circular” path of time during a day; but the highlight of the concert goes to the national premiere of the new work by Eurico Carrapatoso entitled “Pour la Fin, pour mon Commencement” – after the world premiere that will take place in Madrid at the SONY Auditorium, on November 25th, by DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble –, a work in which, in the words of the composer himself, he sought:
“just as in the “Quartet for the End of Time”, where Messiaen makes a retrospective of his work written between the 1920s and the year of its composition, 1940, I also make in this work a retrospective of representative gestures of my production throughout these the last twenty years of uninterrupted creative activity, from the rowdy element to the trend that has been asserted in recent times towards a more sober and leaner character, as is evident in the simplicity of the central mouvement, the piano solo, which evokes Dulcinea del Toboso , “señora de mi alma, día de mi noche, gloria de mis penas, norte de mis caminos”, as if a Don Quixote there sang the eternal feminine; finally, going through this diagonal that runs through my music since I found my voice, so well signified in the slow and introspective mouvements.”
Concert on 28.11.2021, at Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belém: https://www.ccb.pt/evento/dsch-schostakovich-ensemble-2/