Portuguese musicians Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos have been listed as finalists in the Chamber Music category with their recording of Prokofiev’s “Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for violin and piano and Five Melodies Op. 35bis,” released this year by the Belgian-Dutch label Etcetera Records, as announced by the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA) based in Luxembourg.
This marks the duo’s second consecutive nomination, following last year’s entry for best chamber music album with “Music for violin and piano — 20th Century and Forward,” featuring works by Edward Elgar, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel, as well as pieces by Portuguese composer Luiz Barbosa and British composer Ivan Moody.
Violinist Bruno Monteiro and pianist and conductor João Paulo Santos, who has served in the artistic direction of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, have a joint discography spanning over two decades. Their repertoire includes works by César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Karol Szymanowski, Erwin Schulhoff, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Korngold, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, alongside Portuguese composers Luís de Freitas Branco, Fernando Lopes-Graça, Óscar da Silva, and Armando José Fernandes.
In the Chamber Music category, other finalists include ensembles such as the Danel Quartet, last year’s winner with the Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, now competing with Prokofiev’s Quartets, the Belcea Quartet with works by Debussy and Szymanowski, the Alban Berg Quartet with “Livre” by Pierre Boulez, the Quatuor Molinari with pieces by Luciano Berio, and the Pavel Haas Quartet with works by Martinu.
Nominations in the video category include the documentary “The Alchemy of the Piano” by Jan Schmidt-Garre, featuring renowned pianists like Alfred Brendel and Maria João Pires.
The more than 300 nominees across 25 award categories set for March 2026 also include musicians and groups such as Jordi Savall, La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations, La Stagione Armonica and Ottavio Dantone, harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset, pianists Javier Perianes, Daniil Trifonov, Leif Ove Andsnes, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the ensemble Phantasm, violinist Rachel Podger, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, along with conductors Paavo Järvi and Simon Rattle, and pianist and conductor François-Xavier Roth.
Last year, along with Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos, “Ad Tenebras” by Capella Sanctae Crucis and Tiago Simas Freire was also nominated for the ICMA in the early music category, released by Artway as part of the research project Mundos e Fundos by the Classical and Humanistic Studies Center of the University of Coimbra.
The ICMA emerged from the former Midem Classical Music awards, judged by a panel of critics from specialized publications and radio and television stations, who will conduct two more rounds of voting to select the winners in each of the 25 categories, including 16 “classical” ones (baroque music, instrumental, orchestral, choral, opera, etc.) and categories for career, discovery, artist, and composer of the year.
The awards gala is scheduled for March 18, 2026, at the Konzerthalle in Bamberg, Germany, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.
