Performance

Pedro Sousa Silva has been active as a recorder player and ensemble director for more than twenty-five years, giving over two hundred concerts across most of Western Europe and Brazil. His work as a performer is inseparable from his engagement with primary sources: programmes are built from direct contact with manuscripts and early prints, and interpretive decisions emerge from the same questions that drive his research.

His collaborations have brought him alongside some of the leading figures in historically informed performance, including violinists Enrico Onofri and Riccardo Minasi, conductor and harpsichordist Lawrence Cummings, and baroque violinist and conductor Amandine Beyer.

He is the founder and artistic director of Arte Minima, an ensemble dedicated to early Portuguese music with a particular focus on the sixteenth century. Through a series of projects conceived and directed by him — including In Memoriam Sonorum, O Temp(l)o Revisitado, Os Loucos Anos 20 de Quinhentos, A Polifonia Esquecida de Francisco de Santa Maria, and A Música Secreta de Vicente Lusitano — Arte Minima has brought to light repertoires that had never been recorded or performed in modern times. A landmark in this work is the complete recording of all motets from Vicente Lusitano's Liber Primus Epigramatum (Rome, 1551), released as Liber Primus Epigramatum (Pan Classics, 2025) — the first complete recording of this collection. His discography includes, with Arte Minima, In Splendoribus (musicus minusculus, 2021) and Missa "O Beata Maria" (Pan Classics, 2023); with A Imagem da Melancolia, A Arte da Usurpação (Phonoedition, 2007) and The Bad Tempered Consort (Challenge Classics, 2009) — elected by readers of Público as one of the ten best classical recordings of that year; and with Vozes Alfonsinas, Mon Seul Plaisir (2019).

He performs regularly with Gli Incogniti (dir. Amandine Beyer), as soloist in Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, with the Renaissance ensemble Capella Sancte Crucis (dir. Tiago Simas Freire), and with the medieval ensemble Vozes Alfonsinas (dir. Manuel Pedro Ferreira). He is also a regular guest director of the Jovem Orquestra Portuguesa.