The Croatian/Portuguese pianist and musicologist 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 pupil 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 (who studied with V. da Motta, one of the last students of Liszt, as well as with M. Long and J. Fevrier), and earned there a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano, and a master’s degree in musicology. Having thus assimilated the tradition of the Russian as well as German and French schools, he has also received valuable advice from renowned pianists, such as Pierre Sancan, Rudolf Kehrer, Claude Frank, Leonid Brumberg and Peter Katin.

Andres has performed in recitals, with orchestras, and in chamber music concerts in many European countries as well as in Venezuela and the United States. He has collaborated with artists such as Artur Pizarro, Lorenzo Di Bella, Grigori Zhislin, Zakhar Bron, Chiara Isotton e Dejan Ivanovic. The piano duo with his wife, the Irish pianist Honor O’Hea, has, since 1995, met with enthusiastic response from critics and audiences alike.

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. He has been on juries of more than twenty international piano competitions and regularly gives masterclasses. Since 1997 he has been Managing and Artistic Director of the Association of the Friends of the Conservatory. and is also the Artistic Director of Madeira PianoFest.

Having developed an intense activity as a writer and lecturer on musical topics, Andres has contributed to various prestigious music journals, encyclopaedias, and magazines in several countries. In 2001 the Scarecrow Press (U.S.A.) published his book on the beginnings of the scientific approach to piano technique. He is an integrated researcher of INET-md (Institute of Ethnomusicology – Studies of Music and Dance) of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova in Lisbon.