Since the very first time I heard António perform many, many years ago, he has been a standout musician, spreading a unique joy in music-making through his playing, programming, and more recently, conducting. He was perhaps 16, then, a student at the Lisbon Conservatory; I was on the jury. I heard a dozen students playing exams…and one who was already a musician, playing music with verve and finesse. Since those days, our paths have continued to cross on the stage – incidentally when he performed a virtuoso concerto with my orchestra, and intentionally, in various chamber groups exploring contemporary music as well as the baroque, in concerts across Portugal, the United States, and on two tours of India.

A natural performer, he has liberated the recorder from its moorings in the renaissance and baroque, performing sonatas by Mozart and Schubert, adapting 20th-century works, and creating a new repertoire for the instrument by commissioning new works from composers of the present day. Gifted with endless imagination and instrumental capacity, his performances become the ultimate live experience, rather than a mere re-creation of something dusty and preordained. Above all, he brings to the composer’s intentions his personal interpretative genius, thus creating a new totality and in this way breathing life into every kind of music he plays, and delighting audiences throughout the world.

 Katharine Rawdon, flutist