Ricardo Bernardes is a conductor and musical director of the Americantiga Ensemble, an early-music project founded in 1995 and dedicated to the performance and recording of the Iberian-American repertoire from the 17th to the 19th centuries, performing several important concerts in the United States of America, Brazil and Argentina. With this ensemble has recorded six CDs and one DVD with fundamental works of this repertory. Living in Portugal since 2010, Bernardes has direct the modern debut of the opera Basculho de Chaminé by the Portuguese composer Marcos Portugal (1762 – 1830) with the Portuguese Symphonic Orchestra at the Teatro de São Carlos in Lisbon.

Since 2016, Bernardes is the Artistic Director of the Caminhos de Mateus Festival and the International Music Courses of Casa de Mateus, promoted by the Casa de Mateus Foundation in Vila Real, Portugal. In 2017, Bernardes founded the Cappella dei Signori, a male singers ensemble dedicated to perform polyphonic music from the 16th to early 18th century. In 2018, leading the newly created Orquestra Barroca de Mateus, Bernardes has directed the concert “Setaro, el constructor de utopías” with Vivica Genaux and Borja Quiza, whereas the scenic direction was lead by Mario Pontiggia. In 2019, willing to stimulate the recovery of important Portuguese sacred repertory of the 17th and 18th centuries, Bernardes founded the Lisbon Early Music Festival at Igreja das Chagas.

In addition to his intense musical career, Bernardes holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in Musical Sciences from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is currently an Integrated post-doctoral Researcher at CESEM / UNL with funding from FCT. He was editor of the collection “Music in Brazil – Eighteenth and Nineteenth-centuries” by the Ministry of Culture of Brazil and the magazine “Texts of Brazil”, in its number entitled “Brazilian Classic Music”, edited by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition to the academic publications and editions of Luso-Brazilian music from the 18th and 19th centuries, he has been invited to give lectures on Early Music and Cultural Market themes.