A French American classical pianist of Serbian origin, Eugen Indjic has devoted his repertoire to the Romantic period with a focus on Chopin and Schumann. Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, on March 11, 1947, he emigrated to the US with his mother at the age of four and began playing the piano four year later, with Russian pianist Alexander Borovsky. After appearing on an NBC television program at the age of ten, the young prodigy went on to record Beethoven's Diabelli Variations on Sergei Rachmaninov's piano for the RCA label. The following year, he gave his first solo concert with the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Leon Kirchner and resumed his studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Harvard University, graduating in 1969. Acclaimed by critics and fellow musicians such as Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Emil Gilels, Eugen Indjic was only eighteen when he performed Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 under Erich Leinsdorf with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Married to Odile Rabaud, the granddaughter of composer Henri Rabaud, he settled in France and won major prizes in three international competitions: 4th prize at the Warsaw Chopin Competition (1970), 3rd prize at the Leeds Competition (1972), and 2nd prize at the Anton Rubinstein Competition in Jerusalem (1974). The pianist went on to develop an international career between Europe and the United States, performing with conductors such as Georg Solti, Giuseppe Sinopoli and Valery Gergiev. He released albums for the Polskie Nagrania Muza, CBS, Claves, Calliope, and Dux labels, and recorded several recitals devoted to Chopin, Schumann and Debussy. Alongside his solo career, Eugen Indjic taught at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, France. In 1999, to mark the 150th anniversary of Chopin's death, Eugen Indjic was invited to perform the composer's entire piano repertoire for television. In 2007, it was revealed that his recording of Chopin's Mazurkas had also been released under the name Joyce Hatto, one of hundreds of albums issued under her name by her husband in a high-profile fraud case. Eugen Indjic died on February 28, 2024, at the age of 76.
