Biography

Luísa Tender was born in Porto in 1977. She completed her general education at Colégio Luso-Francês in Porto. She studied piano with Maria João Caria, Teresa Monteiro, Anne-Marie Mennet (at the Porto Conservatory of Music), and Pedro Burmester (at the Porto School of Music and Performing Arts). She also received lessons from Helena Sá e Costa. Between 1997 and 2000, she studied with Vitalij Margulis in Los Angeles, and subsequently with Irina Zariskaya at the Royal College of Music in London, where she obtained a Master of Music degree. She later studied with Marian Rybicki and received the Diplôme Supérieur d’Exécution in piano from the École Normale de Musique de Paris. She holds a PhD in Music Sciences, specialising in Music Education and Psychology, from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (NOVA University Lisbon).

Her first CD, Bach and Forward (author’s edition, London, 2009), featuring works by J. S. Bach, F. Schubert and C. Debussy, was named Classical Music Magazine’s Choice of the Month. Her second recording, Página Esquecida, a double CD featuring Portuguese works for cello and piano with Bruno Borralhinho (Dreyer & Gaido, Berlin, 2009), also received highly favourable reviews in leading music publications, including Fanfare, Strings Magazine and Das Orchester.

She recorded the complete piano sonatas of J. D. Bomtempo (Naxos Grand Piano, 2019), an edition that received considerable attention in the international specialist press, including Ritmo, MusicWeb International, Stretto and Musikalifeiten. The Spanish magazine Ritmo devoted an extensive article to her entitled “Tiempo para Bomtempo – Luísa Tender”. In collaboration with Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Luísa also published a multimedia educational album entitled O Pescador de Sons (Lisbon, CESEM, 2019), which was later translated into German (Lisbon, CESEM, 2023). More recently, she made her debut in fiction with the publication of the book Mundos num Oito (Porto, Officium Lectionis, 2026). Following one of her concerts, the London Independent described her as “a natural Beethovenian”.

She began her teaching career as a guest assistant professor at the Porto School of Music and Performing Arts (ESMAE). She is currently Coordinating Professor and Professor of Piano at the School of Applied Arts of the Polytechnic University of Castelo Branco (ESART-UPCB). At this institution, she served as coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Music Education and, since 2024, has been coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Music.

During her years of study, Luísa Tender was a scholarship holder of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Royal College of Music.