Heloísa Fernandes Quartet
Classical & Brazilian music
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Heloísa Fernandes – Composer and Piano
Toninho Carrasqueira – Flute
Sidiel Viera – Bass
Ari Colares – Percussion
The music of Brazilian pianist and composer Heloísa Fernandes is the sound of a woman free to study literature, poetry, nature, classical music, jazz, Brazilian music, to let them shape her identity, to let her identity flow into compositions.
Strong and original, ancient and modern, her sublime creations blossom with rhythmic vitality and melodic delicacy.
With her skill as an improviser she searches their emotional depths and soars with joy. “Fernandes is beyond categorization,” wrote the Post and Courier of her American debut, “She is herself, and I’ll always be interested in any music she cares to explore.”
"This engagement of Heloísa Fernandes Quartet is made possible in part through the Iber Exchange program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts in collaboration with Ibermúsicas."
Ticket Pricing
Venue
Prior-Jollek Hall - Antilles School Campus - St. Thomas - U.S. Virgin Islands
Adults - $30 Teachers - $10 Students - $5 Children - Free of charge
6:00pm - Courtyard open with small meals by Amalia Café & Live Music
7:00pm - Start of the concert
To purchase your ticket, click the link below:
Heloísa Fernandes
Pianist and composer Heloísa Fernandes was born in the city of Presidente Prudente in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and took up the piano at age four. She went on to study with Paulo Gori and Gilberto Tinetti, with whom she cultivated her taste for classical music, and graduated in piano performance from the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo.
She also studied conducting at Centro de Estudos Tom Jobim and composition at the University of São Paulo. Her strong and original repertoire of compositions and arrangements reflect her interests in literature, poetry, nature, classical, jazz, and Brazilian music.
In 2001, she was a finalist in Brazil's leading musical competition – the Prêmio Visa de Música Brasileira – recognition that brought her to national attention. She released her premiere recording, Fruto, in 2005 on Brazil's Maritaca label with repertoire of her own compositions as
well as her arrangements of works by Pixinguinha and Caetano Veloso. Her musical collaborators included some of Brazil's finest musicians -- percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, bassist Zeca Assumpcão, and musical director Gil Jardim.
In 2008, she made her international debut to critical acclaim at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina.
For the next phase of her composing work, Fernandes organized the project Melodias do Brasil – Identidade e Transformação. Over the course of twelve months, she studied the research of Mário de Andrade and his colleagues who had documented Brazilian folkloric melodies in the years 1936 to 1938.
They transcribed melodies from all parts of the country and published 570 of them in Melodias Registradas por Meios Não-Mecânicos in 1946, the first edited material about folklore in Brazil.
The Symphony Orchestra of the University of São Paulo commissioned Fernandes to write arrangements for orchestra and piano of four of her compositions which she premiered with the Orchestra in 2019. Filmmaker José Alberto Cotta commissioned her to compose and perform solo piano music for Exile – The Poesis of Imre Kertész, a documentary about the Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize laureate released in 2020.
To her performance work as a soloist recitalist, Fernandes has created a new duo with Brazilian flutist Toninho Carrasqueira. The range of their repertoire reaches from the traditional to the contemporary. She has also expanded her trio into a quartet with the addition of Carrasqueira and is composing new works for it. Tradition and modernity flow together to stimulate spontaneous creation.
