"Almost everything that Chopin ever wrote is still played. Chopin influenced the entire last half of the nineteenth century and continues to influence composers even today. From Liszt to Wagner, from Moszkowski to the young Scriabin, or from Ernesto Nazareth to Tom Jobim, Chopin is still alive as a composer without borders in time and space who never left us and will never do so." -Marcelo Bratke

Marcelo Bratke, one of Brazil’s finest pianists, has performed in some of the world’s most renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Salzburg Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Konzerthaus in Berlin and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. He started his piano studies at the age of fourteen and due to a severe visual impairment he was unable to read scores properly, developing his own method of learning music based on his auditive memory capacity. Ten months after his first piano lesson, he made his debut with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eleazar de Carvalho and was awarded the ‘Revelation Prize’ by the São Paulo Critics’ Association.

Bratke believes music is an important contribution to society and in 2008 he founded Camerata Brasil, an orchestra formed of young musicians from impoverished areas of Brazilian society, performing with them more than 300 concerts in Brazil, Argentina, Japan, United Kingdom, Serbia, South Korea, Netherlands and in the US where their concert at Carnegie Hall was highly acclaimed by both the public and the critics of The New York Times, New York Post and Concert Net USA.