Biography
João Guilherme Ripper is the current President of the Brazilian Academy of Music and Director of Sala Cecília Meireles
João Guilherme Ripper is composer, conductor, and cultural manager. He graduated in Composition at the School of Music of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
He graduated in Composition at the School of Music of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he studied with Henrique Morelenbaum and Ronaldo Miranda. In 1997, he obtained his D.M.A. in Composition at The Catholic University of the America, in Washington D.C., under the guidance of German composer Helmut Braunlich and Argentine musicologist Emma Garmendia. He pursued further studies in Orchestral Conducting with Maestro Guillermo Scarabino in Argentina, and attended the course “Économie et Financement de la Culture” at the Université Paris-Dauphine, in France.
He frequently collaborates with orchestras, chamber ensembles, theaters and festivals in Brazil and abroad creating new works and acting as composer in residence.
His eight operas hold a central place in his catalog of works. Recent productions include Piedade in the 2017 and 2018 seasons of the Teatro Colón, Theatro Municipal de São Paulo and Sala Cecília Meireles. Onheama premiered at the mythical Teatro Amazonas in Manaus in 2014 and 2015, and was produced in 2016 in Portugal. In 2018, Kawah Ijen premiered at Teatro Amazonas, becoming the first opera to use the Javanese gamelan in the orchestra. Since its creation in 2014, the comic opera O Diletante has been produced in different Brazilian theatres. The monodrama “Portuguese Letters”, his most recent title, was the result of a joint commission by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Orchestra.
