Amaral Vieira, composer, pianist, pedagogue, and musicologist. Born in Sao Paulo in 1952, Vieira is one of the most influential figures in the musical life of Brazil. A child prodigy, he has been performing in solo recitals since the age of eight, and has steadily built a concert career marked by large-scale and highly successful projects. From 1965 to 1976, he studied abroad with many renowned musicians and composers, as a result of several grants awarded by the governments of France, Germany, and England, which brought him to institutions such as the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Lucette Descaves (piano) and Olivier Messiaen (composition), and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he studied with Carl Seeman (piano) and Konrad Lechner (composition). Following his graduation, he was invited by the British Council, London, to work with the pianist Louis Kentner, himself the pupil of a former student of Liszt in Hungary. In 1977 he returned to Brazil, where since then he has continued to play a major role in all areas of musical activity. His importance in the musical life of the country can be inferred from the organization of a festival devoted entirely to his work, which took place in 1984 in Sao Paulo, involving 196 performers who presented 157 of his compositions. He has received several prizes and awards, both as a composer and performer, including the international prize for composition awarded by the Fondation de France for his trilogy for piano, Elegia, Noturno e Toccata, and several awards from the Brazilian Art Critics Association. Vieira's vast output is extremely diverse, encompassing works in virtually every genre and for a great variety of performing ensembles. In his piano works, he has embraced large-scale forms as well as collections of short compositions with a highly distinctive character, in the best tradition of the Romantic and post-Romantic piano miniatures, while his large vocal and orchestral works show a distinct blend of late-Romantic and contemporary techniques. —James Melo, New York University

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