The exceptionally talented Alex Raineri has been awarded the 2014 Australian National Piano Award.
The honour comes after the 21-year-old, who recently graduated with First Class Honours from the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, also just took out the top prize at the Kerikeri International Piano Competition and the Audience Prize in the Mietta Song Competition.
The award-winning pianist says it has been a hectic year but an incredibly enjoyable one.
“I’ve been very happy with the way my playing has been received,” he says.
“It may sound clichéd but music is a language and when I play I really do try to communicate what I think and feel the composer was trying to express so for me it is a combined effort.”
It’s a sentiment that was certainly not missed by the adjudicators of the Australian National Piano Awards, Paul Badura-Skoda from Vienna, Murray McLachlan from London and Australian Wendy Lorenz, who saluted the young musician.
“Alex Raineri is a born communicator with enormous gifts. His understanding and projection of phrasing, colour and characterisation marks him out as an outstanding young artist with a huge international career ahead.”
His stellar career began at an incredibly young age. By 14, Alex had already written part of a score for a feature film and released three albums, which then led him on a three year tour of Australia, Europe and America.
It is with the experiences and emotions captured within music that Alex has found meaning and substance and he is just as enthusiastic as ever about sharing it.
“It seems to me over the recorded centuries of human life that people have either encountered or observed the same finite range of experiences and emotions,” he explains.
“Their artistic reaction is then a product of the materials and technology at hand, and often influenced by the prevailing fashion and social values of their time.
“Not always of course, because there are always innovators and experimentalists who want to find new forms of expression.”
As one of these innovators, Alex now plans to use his $25,500 prize money to pursue his Masters jointly with the Queensland Conservatorium and the Australian National Academy of Music under the tutelage of Leah Horwitz OAM and Timothy Young splitting his time between Brisbane and Melbourne.
He will also travel to Germany again in 2016 to participate in the Darmstadt Summer Course after being chosen as just one of five from hundreds of international participants for the Kranichstein Music Prize Scholarship.
For the moment however, Alex is focused on his next performance test in the finals of Australian National Academy of Music’s concerto competition where he’ll be playing with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Mark Taddei in Hobart on 4 October.
MEDIA CONTACT: Lauren Marino, 0418 799 544, [email protected]