7th Conductor Academy and Competition - Estoril - Portugal

In a year marking the 110th anniversary of the first performance of I.Stravinsky’s "The Firebird" Suite in the Iberian Peninsula, presented in Madrid by the Ballets Russes in 1916 and followed by its arrival in Portugal the following year, the program of the International Academy of Orchestra Conducting – Estoril 26 places this landmark work at the center of its artistic and pedagogical focus.The program also honors another master of original and virtuosic orchestral color, the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi, through his suite "Gli Uccelli", 90 years after the death of the composer. Both Stravinsky and Respighi were students of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a pivotal figure in the development of orchestral timbre in Russian music.The Academy’s program further includes another essential voice of musical modernism: the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose work represents a unique synthesis of European modernist techniques with Brazilian rhythmic, melodic, and formal traditions.