Biographical Info

The Croatian/Portuguese pianist Robert Andres graduated from the Zagreb Music Academy and subsequently received a scholarship from the Soviet government to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with D. A. Svetozarov, a student of the great Russian pianist Sofronitski. He continued his studies in Vienna, and the United States where, as a Fulbright scholarship recipient, he studied at the University of Kansas with renowned Portuguese/American pianist Sequeira Costa, and earned there a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano, as well as a Master’s degree in musicology. He has also received valuable advice from eminent pianists such as Pierre Sancan, Rudolf Kehrer, Claude Frank, Leonid Brumberg and Peter Katin.

After teaching at the Kalamazoo College in Michigan, U. S. A., since 1993 he has been teaching at the Madeira Conservatory – Professional School of Arts, where he is at present a tenured professor of piano and head of the keyboard department.

Andres has performed in recitals, with orchestras, and in chamber music concerts in many European countries and also in Venezuela and the United States. He has collaborated with artists such as Artur Pizarro, Lorenzo Di Bella, Chiara Isotton, Grigori Zhislin and Zakhar Bron. He is often invited to teach masterclasses and has been on juries of more than twenty international competitions.

Since 1997 he is the managing and artistic director of the Association of the Friends of the Conservatory, a concert-organising benefit organisation and is artistic director of the Madeira PianoFest and the Madeira International Piano Masterclasses.

Having developed an intense activity as a writer and lecturer on musical topics, Andres has contributed to a number of prestigious music journals, encyclopaedias, and magazines in various countries (New Grove Dictionary of American Music, American National Biography, Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments), as well as authored a book on the beginnings of the scientific approach of piano technique, published by Scarecrow Press in 2001. Recently he has revised and edited two volumes of music for piano for the Anthology of Music in Madeira, as well as recorded a CD of piano music written in Madeira in the 19^th century.

The Robert Andres/Honor O’Hea piano duo has been active since 1995. They have played concerts both in four-hand and two-piano combinations and have met with enthusiastic response from critics and audiences alike. Various composers, such as Roger Price, Pedro Macedo Camacho and João Victor Costa, have dedicated their works to the duo. They performed for many festivals and concert series in various European countries, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Cyprus, Slovakia, Ukraine, Portugal, Cyprus, Ireland, Slovenia, Belgium, Austria, and Croatia, as well as in the United States. They gave recitals at the annual conferences of EPTA (European Piano Teachers’ Association) in Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Funchal (Portugal). In 2004 they performed at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the “Tribute to Sequeira Costa” Festival, with the return visit as guest artists in April of 2015. In 2008 they released a CD of solo and four-hand piano works by the Madeiran composer Victor Costa. In 2015, they celebrated 20 years of activity as a duo with a performance of Bruch’s Two Piano Concerto with the Madeira Classical Orchestra. During the past few years they performed for the Armonie della Sera Festival, PianoEchos Festival, Barletta Piano Festival (Italy), Eifel Musicale International Festival (Germany), Algarve Music Series (Portugal), Les Concerts de Saint-Merry (Paris, France), Interfest Bitola (Macedonia), Antonio Vivaldi Festival in Cosenza (Italy) and 13^th Washington International Piano Festival in Washington D.C., where they were also on the faculty and in the jury of the 8^th Catholic University of America Piano Competition.