Álvaro Salazar

Álvaro Salazar was born in Porto in 1938; the Portuguese Music Research and Information Centre (MIC.PT) gives his date of birth as 2 March 1938. He described coming from a family in which music was loved but was not anyone's profession. Music was heard often at his parents' home and his maternal grandparents' home, and his mother played the piano well. He began piano lessons by his own choice at about the age of thirteen, with a friend of the family, and also took up classical guitar, first teaching himself with friends and then studying with a teacher.

He continued his musical studies at the Conservatório Nacional in Lisbon while reading law at the University of Lisbon, where he graduated in 1962.

After graduating in law, Salazar joined the Portuguese diplomatic service, but in 1972 he left it to devote himself only to music. From 1973 to 1975 he studied at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, completing the orchestral conducting course with the highest mark, awarded unanimously by the jury. He studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky and Pierre Dervaux and analysis with Gilbert Amy, and, with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, took the electroacoustic music course of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris. MIC.PT notes that he was one of the first Portuguese composers to undertake specialised research in electroacoustic music. In 1965 he had destroyed all the works he had written until then, judging their language incoherent, and his later catalogue was marked by textures in which sound is shaped by silence.

On his return to Portugal he founded the Oficina Musical in 1978 and served as its artistic director. Over nearly five decades the group gave hundreds of concerts in Portugal and abroad, and made a point of giving young musicians at the start of their careers a place on stage alongside established ensembles and soloists.

As a conductor he appeared with the leading Portuguese orchestras and in Spain, Colombia, France, Germany and Italy, and gave world and Portuguese first performances of works by Janáček, Ives, Webern, Villa-Lobos, Varèse, Eisler, Dessau, Kurt Weill, Feldman and Ligeti, among others. He was principal conductor of the Estoril Festival Chamber Group from 1979 to 1985 and a regular collaborator of the Gulbenkian Contemporary Music Encounters. He took part as a composer, juror and lecturer in courses and festivals in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, and attended the Royan, East Berlin and Warsaw festivals as a guest critic.

He taught composition and twentieth century ensemble music at the Conservatório Nacional, and at the higher music schools of Porto and Lisbon he taught introduction to electroacoustic music, history of twentieth century music and aesthetics. MIC.PT credits him with a key role in introducing the teaching of musical analysis, which had not been part of the conservatoire curriculum. His works include the chamber pieces Palimpsestos, Ludi Officinales, Périplos, Quadrivium, Intermezzi, Taleae, Giuoco Piano and Décima quinta Anotação, in memoriam Fernando Lopes-Graça, and for orchestra Glosa e Fanfarra sobre uma Fantasia de António Carreira, Tropos I and a Triple Concerto Grosso.

He was president of the Portuguese Music Council and served on the board of the Portuguese Society of Authors, later as vice-president.

Salazar spoke of his own development as a composer in a 2005 interview with MIC.PT, saying that the great composition lesson of his life had been the study and analysis of other composers' scores, and that conducting had given him an exceptional means of getting to know those works. Many of the musicians he taught remained close to him. The singer Pedro Abrunhosa, who played double bass in the Oficina Musical and dedicated his debut album Viagens to Salazar, wrote after his death that he had been "more than my teacher" and "my true Master in the pure classical sense of the term".

Álvaro Salazar died on Friday 23 October 2026, aged 88. The Oficina Musical announced his death on 24 October, and it was reported by the Lusa news agency, Diário de Notícias and RTP. The cause of death was not made public. His body lay in repose at the Tanatório de Matosinhos, on Rua de Sendim, where a farewell ceremony was held at 3pm on 24 October.

ESMAE, now the Faculty of Performing Arts of the Polytechnic of Porto, expressed its deep sorrow, and tributes came from former students and colleagues including the composer António Pinho Vargas, the clarinettist António Saiote and the musicologist Rui Vieira Nery.

ESMAE described Salazar as an unavoidable reference in teaching, artistic creation and the promotion of the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who left a legacy of great importance to successive generations of students, performers, composers and researchers, and who contributed significantly to an open, critical and innovative musical culture in Portugal. Through the Oficina Musical, his first performances and his teaching, he brought much of the modern repertoire to Portuguese audiences for the first time. In 2012 the Música Viva festival in Lisbon gave special attention to his music.