Festivals

“Clara Rodriguez at the Wigmore Most of what Clara Rodriguez played to a full Wigmore Hall on 20 December was marked by the sheer beauty of her tone".

Max Harrison. Musical Opinion

Clara Rodriguez has founded and directed three music festivals:

• San Martin Theatre of Caracas Festival (1993-1998) for which she obtained support from the Venezuelan Arts Council and, in 1998, from the British Council, to present performances by clarinettist Ian Stuart who played recitals of music by British composers and Luciano Berio, and pianist Niel Immelmann who gave a recital and masterclasses for the local students, and played Grieg's Piano Concerto with the Orquesta Sinfónica Venezuela.
• A Legendary Piano Festival of Caracas (2013) was an event created by Clara Rodriguez to celebrate the purchase of the Steinway Concert Grand model D brought from the Southbank Centre to Venezuela. She invited 16 local pianists to participate and interviewed each of them in public before each concert; she gave two dozen interviews herself on radio, TV and the national press. Norman Lebrecht published a chronicle of the procedure undertaken by Clara Rodriguez to successfully achieve this enterprise, “Brendel’s piano in Caracas”.
• Clara Rodriguez Bolívar Hall Concert Series (2013) Clara invited musicians from the USA, Spain, Germany and France to perform in London.

Un Piano de Leyenda de Caracas Piano Festival

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“What a treat was in store for the gratifyingly large audience at the Purcell Room last autumn. There was a pianist of rare quality to meet us with grace of demeanour and palpable pleasure in her very special brand of musicianship. Her name? Clara Rodríguez; not a newcomer, but one whose return to the South Bank had been rightly anticipated with eagerness by former admirers. And why is she so special? She can and does play softly, with a range of nuance between pianissimo and mezzoforte of rare subtlety, of the kind which makes the music steal upon the ear like vibrations from another world. We heard Schubert’s Sonata in B flat D960, played as the essay in quietude which it surely is: all four movements differentiated in the most perceptive of ways, and the whole producing an unforgettable spell of unsullied beauty. This came after an opening of a group of so-called Children’s Pieces by the Venezuelan composer Antonio Estévez music of character and charm. Later we heard Poema Singelo by Villa-Lobos, a beautiful study in shifting sonorities. Finally came a riveting account of Chopin Sonata in B minor Op.58 magical in its unforced poetic feeling and clarity of articulation”.

Geoffrey Crankshaw. Musical Opinion. London