Eliane Rodrigues (Belgium) ← Back to list
From an early age, it was noticeable that Rio de Janeiro-born pianist ELIANE RODRIGUES was a child prodigy: she started composing at 3 years old, played her first recital at 5, and performed with an orchestra at the ages of 6 and 7. From then on, she won prizes at numerous regional and national competitions, going on to win the special prize at the Van Cliburn Competition in the United States when she was just 18.
She came in fifth place at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1983 and was elected as the people’s number one favorite in 2020, a vote consisting of the top 30 most memorable moments of the competition’s history.
Rodrigues has performed in major cities all over the world. For over 20 years, she has been invited annually to De Doelen in Rotterdam to perform a Chopin recital on Boxing Day. Starting in 1998, Rodrigues became the key figure of the Swiss Música Romântica festival.
She performed as a soloist, conducted orchestras and played chamber music and recitals in the festival for over 20 years. She has also played at open-air festivals in Russia, Netherlands, and Belgium for over 20,000 people.
In conjunction with performing, Rodrigues is a professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, and has coached television personality Thomas Vanderveken in one year to perform Grieg’s piano concerto for a TV show, an enormous personal challenge for Vanderveken, who had taken a break from his studies for several years.
Eliane has recorded over 30 albums of both live concerts and studio recordings, among them being Sergei Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, and all eight of Beethoven’s piano concertos.
Rodrigues is a frequent collaborator with PARMA Recordings, with a digital re-release of the aforementioned Beethoven recordings on Naxos, iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify, two albums — one featuring the works of Chopin and the other of Debussy — and a third album released in 2019 featuring music from Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin. AETERNUM, the fourth album with Parma is a forceful and furious interpretation of keyboard works by Bach and Beethoven. Among them is the latter’s Fifth Symphony, grippingly arranged by Rodrigues herself.
Rodrigues’ most recent album is “Götterfunken”, a transcription by Eliane herself of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for two pianos. “The recording between mother and daughter (Nina Smeets) exudes passionate energy. When I first heard it, I was struck by the enormity of the sound that the two pianists were able to produce.” Lowry Yankwich – Fanfare Archive