Raised in Sacramento and based in London, American pianist Anyssa Neumann has been praised for the “clarity, charm, and equipoise” of her performances, which span solo and collaborative repertoire from the Baroque to the 21st century.
A dedicated contrapuntalist, Anyssa has given all-Bach recitals at The Banff Centre, the Sacramento Bach Festival, and St James Piccadilly in London. Bach’s music has also featured on tours of Canada and the American West Coast during the 2017/18 and 2018/19 seasons, including recitals in Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Montréal, Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, Denver, and on recital series at UC Riverside and UC Davis. Other notable venues have included St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Holywell Music Room, the Vernon Ellis Foundation, the American Cathedral in Paris, Chiesa di San Paolo entro le Mura in Rome, and Mazzoleni Hall in Toronto. In 2016, she gave the UK premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn (2010) for piano and live electronics at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building in Oxford.
Anyssa has released two recordings, with a third scheduled this coming year. Her solo debut album of works by Bach, Beethoven, Messiaen, and Prokofiev was featured on David Dubal’s radio program The Piano Matters in New York and Chicago; The Holland Times praised it for “moving between old and modern material with breathtaking ease and fluency,” and La Scena Musicale described it as “subtle and lyrical…poetic and complex.” Her disc with with Grammy Award-winning cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio (Eroica Trio), Dreaming, has been broadcast on radio stations throughout the United States, and the duo has been heard on NPR’s Performance Today and Sirius Satellite Radio as well as in concert at the Huntington Arts Festival in New York and Sevenars Festival in Massachusetts.
Anyssa performs regularly in the UK with bass-baritone Timothy Dickinson; their current project explores Don Quxiote-inspired songs and arias. In 2016-17, she toured an American art song project with mezzo-soprano Katherine Nicholson, featuring works by Barber, Copland, Chanler, Rorem, and Ives. She has also collaborated with sopranos Rena Harms and Emma Tring, violinists Yolanda Bruno and Amy Tress, violist Esme Allen-Creighton, pianist Joseph Li, cellist Simon Fryer, and trumpeter Jens Lindemann, and has performed with the London Chamber Collective and the Alexandra Ensemble. As guest pianist, Anyssa toured France with the Sheba Ensemble, an all-female, New York-based chamber group specializing in traditional Jewish music infused with jazz, classical music, and bossa nova. She has held artist residencies at the Banff Centre, the Bergman Estate, and Avaloch Farm Music Center.
A graduate of Manhattan School of Music (BM), where she studied with Phillip Kawin and Marc Silverman, and Oxford University (MSt), Anyssa pursued advanced performance studies with Fabio Bidini in Berlin and Paul Stewart at Université de Montréal. She has additionally worked with Thomas Adès, Rita Wagner, and András Keller at IMS Prussia Cove and with Mitsuko Uchida, Anne Sofie von Otter, Bengt Forsberg, Marc Durand, Julian Martin, Ronan O’Hora, Andre-Michel Schub, Joseph Kalichstein, and Russell Sherman in master classes. In 2010, she was one of ten pianists from around the world selected to take part in a week-long Beethoven seminar with Anton Kuerti at the Banff Centre.
Anyssa completed a PhD in musicology at King’s College London in 2017, focusing on pre-existing music in the films of Ingmar Bergman. She is currently touring a lecture-recital about Bergman’s use of classical music, with appearances at the Ingmar Bergman: 100 Years conference at Lund University, TIFF in Toronto, Filmoteca Española in Madrid, the Helsingborg Classical Music Festival, London’s Blackheath Halls, and Bowdoin College in Maine. She has presented at conferences in London, New Orleans, and Los Angeles and has guest lectured at City University of London, the School of Advanced Study at Senate House, Hebrew University, and University of Washington. She currently holds a postdoctoral research position at Uppsala University in Sweden.
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