Date
11/07/2025

Ji Hye Jung, Emil Kuyumcuyan and Jean Geoffroy were the featured guest musicians at the sixth edition of Percuart – Percussion Festival, organized by the School of Applied Arts (ESART) of the Castelo Branco Polytechnic in collaboration with the local municipality.

Directed by ESART percussionists André Dias and Bruno Costa, the event took place between July 7 and 11 in various venues in the city (Cine Teatro Avenida, Fábrica da Criatividade and Centro de Cultura Contemporânea), and included the usual series of concerts, recitals and workshops.

The ESART Percussion Group opened the event, with the line-up of “Portuguese Music for Percussion” including compositions by António Chagas Rosa and the premiere of Pedro Lima’s “Fragmentos”. This was followed, over the five days of the festival, by the same formations from the Escola Superior de Música and the Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espetáculo, from the polytechnics of Lisbon and Porto, respectively.

In the recitals by the finalists, Tiago Pessoa, master’s students André Castro, Francisco Fernandes and Miguel Pires, the latter a member of the KODU Percussion Group, as well as André Nadais, a teacher at the Setúbal Regional Conservatory, took to the stage.

In the concerts, the highlight of the program, South Korean Ji Hye Jung, principal percussionist of Camerata Pacifica and professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA, was joined by W. Lee Vinson, as well as Francisco Teixeira and Manuel Dias, from the ESART Percussion Group.

Emil Kuyumcuyan premiered “Istanbul Roots” on Portuguese soil, his first multimedia performance, inspired by the musician’s hometown with Croatian, Greek, Armenian and African roots, which combines influences from Anatolia and classical music with jazz and electronics.

For their part, the RePercussion Trio, which is dedicated to contemporary, experimental and performative music, focusing on the development of new techniques, instruments and artistic works, presented the audience with the sound and visual show “Metatempo”.

The closest contact with the public took place in the workshops with Kuyumcuyan and Jung, and in the masterclasses that Jean Geoffroy, director of the Lyon Conservatoire’s Transversal Creation Space Pole and professor at the Paris Conservatoire, dedicated to his Light Wall System and the interpretation of Bach on the marimba.

New at PercuART ’25 was the “Aqua-Eco-Lumina” exhibition by ESART’s Digital Media Group. With artistic direction by Rui Dias and João Beira, the seven interactive multimedia installations (“Ágora Florida”, “Empatia Líquida”, “D’a Folha em Branco”, “Aparência do Esttico”, ‘SPEAK’, “Zen Waterfall” and “Espelho da Alma”), created by students from the Master’s in Digital Media Production and the Bachelor’s in Electronic Music and Music Production, have water and sound as their central motifs.

The Castelo Branco Sinfonietta, which performed in its full version, accompanied by soloists Miguel Pires and André Castro, closed the festival with baroque and contemporary repertoire, premiering the piece “Concerto for timpani and string orchestra”, by clarinettist João Carlos Alves, a professor at ESART.