PARTICIPANTS

ROBERT ANDRES & HONOR 0'HEA

The Honor O’Hea and Robert Andres duo has been active since 1995. They are a four-hand, two-piano duo, and have been enthusiastically received by audiences and the musical press in more than fifteen countries. A number of composers, including Roger Price and João Victor Costa, have dedicated works to them. Amongst their most important performances are recitals in Dubrovnik, 1997, in Vienna, in 2001 and 2002, in 2003 and 2009 at the Festival de Música do Palácio da Bolsa in Oporto, at the Idrija Music Festival (Slovenia), the Tribute to Sequeira Costa Festival at the University of Kansas and the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Festivals of Monte San Savino and Galatina, Italy, the Festival of Arts in Kiev (2008), the Ledra Chamber Music Festival in Cyprus, and also recitals in Bélgica (2004), in Madeira and in Barcelona (2006), in Poland (2006 and 2008), Messina and Adelfia (Italy) and Cork (Ireland) in 2007, where they also gave a two-day masterclass for the Cork Music School.

The Duo has recorded a CD of piano works by the Madeiran composer João Victor Costa, released to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Funchal. Recently they have played at the Municipal Theatre of Roses (Costa Brava) and the Church of St Nicholas in Freiburg (Germany). In March 2011 they took part in the Encontros de Piano do Porto, at the António de Almeida Foundation.

Robert Andres graduated from the Zagreb Academy of Music (Croatia), and studied at the St Petersburg Conservatoire with D.A. Svetozarov, a disciple of the great Russian pianist Sofronitsky. He continued his studies in Vienna and the USA, where he studied with Sequeira Costa at the University of Kansas, where he earned a doctorate in musical arts and a master's degree in musicology.

He has given recitals, performed concertos with orchestra and chamber music in various European countries, such as Russia, Austria, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Slovenia and Portugal, and also in Venezuela and the USA. He has collaborated with artists such as Zakhar Bron, Grigori Zhislin, Alessandro Perpich and the Lopes-Graça Quartet.

He began his teaching activity at Kalamazoo College, in the United States, continuing from 1993 at the Madeira Conservatory-Professional School of Arts, being currently professor of the piano faculty.

He regularly gives piano masterclasses and has been a member of a number of juries for national and international competitions. Since 1997 he has been President of the Council of the Association of Friends of Madeira Music Conservatory.

He has written for specialist music journals, renowned encyclopaedias and journals in various countries and, from 1995 to 2002, wrote for the Jornal da Madeira, publishing a weekly column. He has also written booklet notes for a number of CDs and concert series by Artur Pizarro. In 2001 the American publisher Scarecrow Press published his book on the beginnings of the scientific approach to piano technique.

Honor O’Hea studied in her native country with the renowned teacher Mabel Swainson and with the Czech pianist Jan Gap. She has been awarded a number of prizes, including a Yamaha Music Foundation of Europe grant and, for two years running, a grant from the Ulster Bank Music Foundation Awards. She also studied with the French pianist Pascal Rogé in Nice and Paris and the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda at the Academia Chigiana in Siena, Italy.

She took her master's in piano in the USA, on a Fullbright scholarship, studying with Sequeira Costa at the University of Kansas. She later had private lessons from Dominique Merlet in Paris. In 1996 Honor O’Hea was the first non-American student to receive the Adell-Hancock grant from the International Education Institute of the United States.

She has given many solo, chamber and orchestral concerts in the USA, Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Great Britain, Croatia, Austria and Ireland. Her performances in Madeira have included several appearances as soloist with the Classical Orchestra of Madeira, notably Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, at the Madeira Festival of Music. She is currently professor of piano at the Madeira Conservatory – Professional School of Arts.

Rui Guerreiro Rodrigues was born in Lisbon. He studied music at the National Conservatory of Music with Girão Ferreira and at the Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra with Jean-François Lézé. He was a member of the Orquestra Académica Metropolitana and section leader of the Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil. He has collaborated with the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Oporto, the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra, the Lisbon Sinfonietta, the Orchestra of the North and the Gulbenkian Orchestra.

In 2005 he founded the percussion ensemble Ritmos e Sons with Jorge Garcia, in order to disseminate percussion music by both Portuguese and foreign composers. He was also a member of the Ensemble Metropolitano de Percussões and worked with the Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa. In 2007 he also founded RGGB: improvised music for percussion and double-basses, with which he gave concerts on the themes Six Senses!?, The Four Elements, Seven Deadly Sins, Mapping the Soul, Restlessness, Reflection, Meditation and Ten for Two. In the same year he took a course with the TOCÁRUFAR Percussion Orchestra.

As a teacher, he was worked at the Academy of Music of Fundão, the Professional School of Mirandela and the Metropolitan Conservatory of Lisbon, and is currently a professor of percussion at the Conservatory – Professional School of Arts of Madeira.

He has given courses for children entitled: Let's Recycle Music – Building Percussion Instruments, (Per)Curtir – Percussion in the Family, Symphony of Rubbish – Music with Recyclable Material. Since 2002 he has been section leader of the Classical Orchestra of Madeira.

Jorge Luís García Mendoza was born in 1967 in Venezuela. He began his studies at the Simon Bolivar Conservatory in Caracas and continued at the State Foundation for Youth and children's Orchestras of Venezuela (FEOJV). In 1982 he began studying trumpet, and later took a course in orchestral conducting. In 1987 he began to study percussion, obtaining his diploma as a percussionist. In 1990 he was invited to join the Juan José Landaeta National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela as principal timpanist and percussionist. There he founded the Tempo Exacto percussion group. In 1991 he received the performer's diploma from the Institute of Musical Sciences in Caracas, and began his professional career with the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Orchestra, in Caracas. He took part in that year in two series of CD recordings of Latin-American music with the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra. He was teacher of percussion and musical training for the Children's and Youth Orchestras of Venezuela system in 1994, and assistant conductor of the Vicente Emilio Sojo Youth Orchestra. In the following year he began the percussion journal Beat & Drums. Since 1995 he has been teaching at the Music Conservatory of Madeira as Titular Professor of Percussion and, since the following year has been principal timpanist and percussionist of the Classical Orchestra of Madeira. In 1998 he took a conducting course with Roberto Perez and conducted the orchestra in a series of educational concerts at the RAM. He is currently percussion teacher at CEPAM and percussion soloist with the Classical Orchestra of Madeira.