Hailed by the critics for his elegant playing (The New York Times) and for his unfaltering brio (Gramophone), Max Barros has won wide acclaim as one of South America’s foremost pianists. Born in California and raised in Brazil, Mr. Barros was presented with the “Soloist of the Year” Award (1985) by the São Paulo Music Critics Association for his performance of Brahms’ Piano Concerto in D minor with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP). 

Mr. Barros has recorded for Naxos the complete Piano Concertos by Camargo Guarnieri with conductor Thomas Conlin and the Warsaw Philharmonic, which won the “Discovery Award” from the Diapason magazine in France and is currently recording the complete solo piano works by Guarnieri in six volumes.

For the past twenty seasons, Mr. Barros has been the co-artistic director of the Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC), an organization that creates unique productions merging dramatic and fully staged scripts with music on off-Broadway. The New York Times praised Mr. Barros for his “rapturous” performance of Rachmaninoff’s music, and Opera Today remarked, “Mr. Barros… made the piano drip with beauty and elegance, with an incomparable grace in his legato.” 

Max Barros is a Steinway artist.

J.S. Bach - Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Pre concert lecture from 4.00PM with James Melo

JAMES MELO is a Senior Supervising Editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (CUNY-Graduate Center), the New York correspondent for the music magazine Sinfónica (Uruguay) and the musicologist for the Ensemble for the Romantic Center (New York). He has been musicological consultant and program notes writer for the Montreal Chamber Music Festival and the National Philharmonic (Maryland). He has written program notes for the major concert halls in New York City, and is the program notes writer for the recordings of the complete works of Villa-Lobos and Camargo Guarnieri, on the Naxos label.