| Variations of Name | Antonio Jacques de Almeida Santos |
| Biography | Antonio de Almeida was a French conductor and musicologist.
As a child he studied piano, showing great musical talent. In the 1940s, he taught himself to play the clarinet by listening to recordings of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. When his family moved to Buenos Aires he studied with Alberto Ginastera, and he had the opportunity to hear performances conducted by notable European refugees at the Teatro Colón.
He studied nuclear chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leading a student orchestra there, he realized he was more interested in music than in science. His godfather, pianist Artur Rubinstein, convinced him to give up his full scholarship at M.I.T. He attended Yale University, where he studied musical theory with Paul Hindemith. He took conducting courses with Sergei Koussevitzky and Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, and also studied conducting with George Szell.
He began conducting for Portuguese Radio in Lisbon in 1949, and soon after was appointed to his first conducting post at the Oporto Symphony Orchestra. While there, he invited Thomas Beecham to guest conduct the orchestra. He was the conductor of the Portuguese Radio in Lisbon (19571960) and Stuttgart Philharmonic (19621964). He was principal guest conductor of the Houston Symphony (19691971) and then music director of the Orchestre philharmonique de Nice (19711978). He became the music director of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in 1993, a position he held at his death. |