Pianist Eduardo Fernández star was on the rise in his native Spain in 2020, essaying unusual repertory and rejecting much of the conventional star-making machinery of classical music. Fernández has laid stress on recordings as an important means of communication between artist and audience. Unconnected to the Uruguayan guitarist of the same name, Eduardo Fernández was born in Madrid in 1981. His teachers included Carmen Aguirre, Almudena Cano, and Ana Guijarro, but he would dismiss the importance of this: "Today all pianists play in the same places and study with the same teachers. That no longer has value: it is the same paragraph repeated in all the biographies," he told El Mundo. He has performed with Spain's RTVE Orchestra, City of Granada Orchestra, and the ORCAM Orchestra in Madrid. His career as a recitalist has taken him across Spain as well as to the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Beijing National Center for the Performing Arts, and the Luxembourg Philharmonie, among others. Fernández is notable for the number of offbeat awards he accumulated early in his career; these included the award El ojo crítico in 2016. Fernández has laid stress on the recorded artifact: "The album remains and reflects something very thoughtful; in a [streaming] video nobody knows if it corresponds to the best performance or the worst of the 20 performances of an opera, for example," he said. "On [streaming sites], when you don't know what you want to hear, you hear what an algorithm tells you." Fernández made recordings of music by Albéniz and other conventional repertory, including a set of short piano pieces by Brahms, recorded for Centaur in 2013. In the later 2010s, however, his repertory turned toward the unusual, with an album of piano works by Ramón Paús appearing on Naxos in 2017. He was signed to the BIS label and released an album of the technically difficult complete piano works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann in 2020.