Hans Eijsackers is one of the most prominent pianists in the Netherlands, with a wide variety of activities encompassing concerto solos, recitals, song and duo sonata accompaniment, and teaching. Eijsackers was born in The Hague on February 15, 1967. At the age of 13 he notched a pair of competition victories in the Rotterdam Three-Day Piano Competition and the Princess Christina Competition. His teachers included Gérard van Blerk, Jan Wijn, and György Sebök. Further major wins came at the European Piano Competition in Luxembourg in 1991, where he took the top prize and also a special prize for best song accompaniment. The following year, Eijsackers graduated with honors from Amsterdam's Sweelinck Conservatory and accepted an invitation for further study at the European Mozart Academy in Krakow, Poland. Success in that program proved to be a springboard to appearances in Hungary, Britain, New York, and Southeast Asia. In 2001, Eijsackers was included in the internationally booked Rising Stars series promoted by the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, making appearances at New York's Carnegie Hall and at Wigmore Hall in London. He played in several chamber music formations: the Hexagon Ensemble from 2000 to 2007, and a clarinet-and-piano duo with Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer, with whom he recorded the complete clarinet sonatas of Max Reger. Eijsackers has given frequent solo and chamber recitals at the conservatories of Tilburg and The Hague, and has performed solos with the Holland Symfonia (Het Balletorkest), the Chemnitz Philharmonic, and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. He is in demand as a song accompanist, performing with, among others, Dutch singers Xenia Meijer, Geert Smits, and Henk Neven. Since a joint tour in the series Rising Stars in 2001, including recitals in Carnegie Hall, New York and Wigmore Hall, London, he has formed a duo with clarinetist Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer. They recorded a CD with the complete sonatas of Max Reger. A frequent festival guest, Eijsackers has appeared at the Gergiev Festival, the Festival di Musica Classica di Linari, the Orlando Festival, the Grachten Festival, and the Toon Festival. He has been the artistic director of the open-air Uitgast Festival in Lelystad, the Netherlands, since 2007. Exceptionally among Dutch artists, he has also made frequent appearances and has given master classes in Indonesia, in the city of Surabaya. Eijsackers began teaching song interpretation at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule in Düsseldorf in 2013. With Henk Neven, he has released several song recital albums on the Onyx label, including With Love from Russia in 2018. ~ James Manheim