Anne Rainwater
Oakland, California-based pianist Anne Rainwater is a dexterous musician known for her vibrant interpretations of works from J.S. Bach to John Zorn. Recognized for her “boldly assertive rhetoric” (San Francisco Examiner) and “bright golden honeycomb for a brain” (Roy Doughty, poet), she appears as a soloist and chamber musician. Anne has performed in venues and festivals throughout the US and Europe, including the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany, the Kennedy Center, Princeton University, University of California San Diego, Louisiana State University, and Le Poisson Rouge, among others. She holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music. Anne also curates a monthly musical gathering in Oakland called the Vernon Salon Series.
A feisty agent for new music, Anne has presented contemporary solos at Cornelia Street Café, CNMAT, NY Sound Series, Switchboard Music Festival, BLUEPRINTS Piano Series, and the Center for New Music, and has also performed with the Mendocino Music Festival and Nevada County Composers Cooperative on multiple occasions. She has collaborated with and premiered works by Stuart Saunders Smith, Nils Vigeland, Jude Traxler, Danny Clay, Ken Thomson, Matthew Hough, and Brett Dietz. She also works regularly with trombonist William Lang, visual artist Victoria Welling, percussionist/composer Jude Traxler, mezzo-soprano Melinda Becker, and pianist Emily Tian. Anne has a long-term commissioning project with William Lang that focuses on underrepresented communities in the low brass world, and they have recently commissioned composers Anne Hege and Alex Temple.
Diverse musical appearances include a live radio interview on KZYX’s The Mind of the Composer with composer Jay Sydeman, chamber music performances in Urbania, Italy, two Bach Prelude and Fugue Marathons at the McRoskey Mattress Co. in San Francisco (where she was praised for her “sympathetic musicianship”) and other shows at Galapagos, Gray Area Theater, Areté Venue and Gallery, Georgia's Tuesday's Music Live, and Bargemusic. Recent lecture and guest artist appearances include UC Berkeley and Cal State East Bay in Hayward, where she presented a lecture recital on the Goldberg Variations. Showcasing her musical range, Anne toured to Germany and Austria with the band CocoRosie in 2012, where she composed and workshopped improvised dance music alongside film composer wunderkinds Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurrianns of Stenfert Charles. She has attended residencies at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute and the Blue Mountain Chamber Music Retreat. She is a 2019 recipient of an InterMusic SF Musical Grant alongside her New Moon Duo partner, mezzo soprano-Melinda Becker. They are commissioning Nicolas Benavides to write a song cycle entitled Canto Caló, which will be premiered in February of 2020.
Anne's first solo album, J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, was released in December 2018, and she has also recorded for Original Abstractions, Bourbon Thomas Records, Pinna Records, Subliminal Sounds, and Oberlin Conservatory’s Aural Capacity series. She has trained in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and is very intersted in the brain's understanding and mapping of concepts through a variety of sensory inputs and networks. When not at the piano, Anne can be found running long distances, hanging out with her ornery cat Ernie, or reading excessively.