Musician & Composer
Luís Tinoco graduated at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. Later, in the UK, he completed a composition MMus at the Royal Academy of Music, in London, and a PhD in Music research at the University of York. In March 2016 he was awarded an ARAM (Associate of the Royal Academy of Music). Since 2000 he has worked as a freelance author and producer of new music radio programs for Antena 2 / RTP (Portugal's national broadcaster). For this same radio, Tinoco is the artistic director of the Young Musicians Prize and Festival.
He also lectures at Escola Superior de Musica, in Lisbon.
Tinoco's catalogue includes vocal and stage works such as Search Songs (2007) – for soprano and orchestra, setting texts by Alexander Search; From the Depth of Distance (2008) – for soprano and orchestra, setting texts by Walt Whitman and Álvaro de Campos; Evil Machines (2008), a music theatre project with libretto and stage direction by the Monty Python Terry Jones; Paint Me (2010), a chamber opera with libretto by Stephen Plaice and stage direction by Rui Horta; Wanderings of a Solitary Dreamer (2011), a cantata with text by Almeida Faria; and Lídia (2014), a dance piece choreographed by Paulo Ribeiro.
Orchestral works include Cercle Intérieur (2012), premiered by the Radio France Philharmonic at the Cité de La Musique; Horn Concerto (2013), dedicated to Abel Pereira and premiered at the 45th International Horn Symposium (Memphis, EUA); Frisland (2014) – premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra at the Benaroya Hall; Incipit (2015) premiered by the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra in June 2015 (Rio de Janeiro); The Blue Voice of the Water, a work co-commissioned by the Orquestra Gulbenkian and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (2015), Cello Concerto, premiered by Filipe Quaresma and the Portuguese Symphony; and Entre Silêncios - Clarinet Concerto, premiered by Horácio Ferreira and the Gulbenkian Orchestra.
From 2016 to 2018 Luís Tinoco was the Composer-in-Residence at the São Carlos Theatre - Portuguese National Opera House. In 2017, he was Resident Composer at Casa da Música (Porto).
Tinoco’s music is available on commercial CDs recorded with the Orquestra Gulbenkian (Naxos 8.572981, 2013) and the Ensemble Lontano (Lorelt 121, 2005). In 2018, the record label Odradek released a new CD with world premiere recordings of orchestral music by Tinoco, with interpretations by the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, Portuguese Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, and with cellist Filipe Quaresma as soloist. More recently, also through the record label Odradek, Tinoco released Archipelago - a new album fully devoted to his percussion works, performed by the Drumming GP. In 2022, the new label Next releases "Alepo and other silences" (Next 2022), exclusively dedicated to Tinoco's chamber music written between 1998 and 2021.
Since 2016, Tinoco is Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM), and in 2019 he was awarded the DSCH - Shostakovich Ensemble 2019 Prize for Composers. The prize included the commission of a piece for the ensemble and Luis wrote a piece for clarinet, violin and piano, entitled Aleppo. His music is published in the UK by the University of York Music Press.
Luís Tinoco is the coordinator of the Young Composers program.
