Eliane Rodrigues

Piano

Eliane Rodrigues was born in Rio de Janeiro. At the age of 6, she played a Haydn concerto with the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira under the direction of Eleazar de Carvalho, which was also broadcast on television, and the Mozart concerto KV488.

She studied ao with Arnaldo Estrella (piano soloist, pupil of Alfred Cortot and friend of Villa Lobos), won the jury's "special prize" at the Van Cliburn competition in the USA and was prizewinner in the Queen Elisabeth Competition (the first and sole brazilian in the history) with Beethoven's 4th, a performance that is still talked about by listeners and TV viewers. Since then she has been a favourite with Belgian, Dutch, and German audiences and has performed in over 20 countries. Her intelligent and genial musical feeling permits a repertory of 45 piano concertos. She has recorded 16 CDs.

 After several years of absence, due to a disease and family affairs, she is back, riper and refined.

 In 1990 she took up composing again, producing brilliant and at times mischievous cadenzas for her concertos. In 1994-95 she wrote her 15 Momentos Musicais and composed the Sonate Oubliee with themes from her childhood. The world premiere for the Momentos Musicais was given in January 1996 on Radio Bremen.

  Her characteristics have remained unchanged : simplicity and spontaneity, feeling and imagination, technique, perfection without affectation, a delight for the eye and ear. In February 1998 Rodrigues Bach-CD was recorded. The critics describe her improvisations and paraphrases on works for the organ as: "The sonorities go back to the scale of more than 3 centuries of piano literature and link perfectly well up with the richness in colour of an independent way of pianistic thinking, they have their own new life, a fascinating transfiguration, full of phantasy." A great revelation was the Dutch creation of Gerhard's concerto for piano and strings in the main concerthalls in the Netherlands.

From 8. untill 22. August 1998 Rodrigues was the leading artist in the first edition of "Musica Romantica", a festival in Saas-Fee (Switzerland) with Russian and Dutch Symphonic Orchestra's, recitals and chamber music. Concerts in Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Brussel.