Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra 

Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra (ANSO) started its activity in October 1992. The following year it was officially instituted as a Private Higher Education Institution through Decree No. 1202/93 issued by the Ministry of Education and published in the Diário da República [Journal of the Republic].

ANSO integrates the project of the Association Music, Education and Culture – the Sense of Sounds, whose most prominent face is the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra (OML). In this universe, dozens of teachers and hundreds of students live side by side with the 35 elements that form the core base of the professional orchestra.

ANSO is distinguished by its rare characteristics. With the objective of guaranteeing the broadest technical, theoretical and artistic education of each student, it places strongly emphasis on the musical practice as a whole, whether in chamber groups or in the Metropolitana’s Academic Orchestra (OAM), a true training tool with the purpose of holding public concerts.

ANSO students also join Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra frequently to interpret the large symphonic repertoire. Amongst the more than four hundred musicians already formed in the three options of the Bachelor Music degree – Instrument Performance for Orchestra, Piano for Chamber Music and Accompaniment and Orchestral Conducting – many were awarded in national and international competitions and integrate prestigious national and foreign orchestras.

Examples of this are the Remix Ensemble Casa da Música, the Gulbenkian Orchestra, the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonic Orchestras of Munich, Baltimore, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Gothenburg, among many others. About a dozen of musicians formed by ANSO are now part of the OML, places that they won in international competitions held for that purpose.

Mission

ANSO aims to provide a training of excellence for orchestra musicians, understood not only as top training in artistic and academic terms, but also promoting the music as fundamental artistic expression for the formation of the individual as a human being and citizen.

Vision

To be a leading orchestra academy at European level, anchored in principles of multidisciplinary and transversality with other areas of knowledge and skills, at national and international level, implementing for this the most technically developed and appropriate means.

Values

Excellence, Professionalism, Passion, Respect, Union, Sharing