Friday, March 16, 2018

Anne Rainwater Piano Recital Tomorrow

Pianist Anne Rainwater (photograph by Jamie Jung, from Rainwater’s Web site)

This is a last-minute announcement; but it is definitely worth making. Oakland-based pianist Anne Rainwater will be presenting the March installment in the Seventh Avenue Performances recital series. I remember when this series was launched; and I am more than a little disappointed that it fell off of my radar, particular since it is now in its fifteenth season. I have been most aware of Rainwater’s work through her many appearances at the Center for New Music, including her membership in the New Keys ensemble of four pianists, whose other members are Kate Campbell, Anthony Porter, and Regina Schaffer.

Tomorrow she will be presenting a program conceived to probe the very nature of listening to music. She is particularly interested in looking beyond the music itself (what Immanuel Kant called the “thing-in-itself”) to address the impact of context, suggesting that perception always involves more than just the individual observer and the observed object. Where music is concerned, context has both historical and immediate aspects. On the historical side listening is impacted by knowledge of when a piece was composed and possibly the circumstances under which composition took place. However, in the “immediate present” context may be involved how listening to one composition will impact how we listen to the next piece on the program.

To address these issues, Rainwater will explore how the music of two contemporary composers, Mei-Fan Lin and Danny Clay, can influence how we listen to the twentieth-century composers Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Arnold Schoenberg and vice versa. Similarly, because all three of those past composers were living at the same time at the beginning of the twentieth century, Rainwater can address the questions of how much influence they had on each other and in what ways. As of this writing, the specific compositions on the program have not yet been announced; but it is clear that Rainwater has put some imaginative thought into preparing a concert program that will also serve as a “dataset.”

This recital will begin tomorrow evening, March 17, at 7:30 p.m. The Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church is located at 1329 Seventh Avenue, about half a block south of the stop for the Muni N trolley line. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for students and seniors and $5 for children aged twelve and under. Tickets are available in advance online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

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