Hailed as a "born communicator" (The Australian), a "brilliant young musician" (Otago Times), and a “soloist of superb virtuosic skill and musicality” (Limelight), Australian artist Alex Raineri (b. 1993) lives on Jagera and Turrbul land in Meanjin (Brisbane, Queensland). He is active throughout Australia and Internationally as a piano recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician, harpsichordist, composer, writer, producer, and educator. Alex is an artist ambassador for Kawai Australia.

International tours include America, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Finland, Netherlands, Asia, and New Zealand. Within Australia, Alex has been a featured artist at many major festivals, series, and venues. On home soil in Brisbane, he is the creative director of FourthWall Arts, an intimate theatre space in Brisbane’s CBD. He regularly collaborates with Opera Queensland as a soloist, collaborative pianist, and repetiteur.

Alex is the Artistic Director of the annual Brisbane Music Festival. Praised for its "diverse programming" (Limelight), the BMF celebrates its seventh year of operations in 2024. Within the festival he embodies a multitude of roles including Artistic Director, producer, marketing and social media manager, grant writing and philanthropy, and coordination and delivery of an impactful young artist program. As well as a significant annual season in Brisbane, BMF has toured festival shows to London, Melbourne, Bundaberg, and Maleny.

As a concerto soloist he has appeared with the Queensland, Tasmanian, Darwin, and West Australian Symphony Orchestras, Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra Victoria, Ensemble Q, Southern Cross Soloists, Four Winds Festival Orchestra, Bangalow Festival Orchestra, Queensland Youth Symphony, and the Queensland Pops Orchestra. 

Radio broadcasts include BBC Radio 3, Radio NZ, California Capital Public Radio, Chicago’s WFMT, ABC Classic FM, and all of the Australian MBS Networks.  

A passionate advocate for contemporary music, Alex has commissioned over 80 works and has given over 140 World Premieres and over 170 Australian Premieres to date. Australian premieres include music by Messiaen, Lachenmann, Feldman/Beckett, Reich, Cage, Luther-Adams, Birtwistle, Furrer, Kurtag, Saunders, Fure, Henze, Murail, Hurel, and Aperghis. Alex has worked with and/or commissioned works from many of Australia's leading composers including Brett Dean, Liza Lim, Chris Dench, Elliott Gyger, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, James Ledger, Kate Moore, Lachlan Skipworth, Gerard Brophy, Paul Dean, Lyle Chan, Erik Griswold, and many others. 

Alex’s own compositional practice sits in the creative space where tradition aligns with innovation. It interrogates the intersection between the old and the new, weaving conventional ‘known’ sounds in fresh new ways. The gestural language of his work is firmly rooted in strong creative concepts, linking the abstract nature of art music to more concrete narratives. With gesture as a focal point, Alex’s compositional practice is imbued with varying levels of prescriptiveness, oscillating between notated music and semi-improvisatory realms.

Discography includes How Strange the Change and I'll Walk Beside You (ABC Classics), Liquid Crystal and Trying to Remember What I Chose to Forget (MOVE Records), Transfiguration, Inventions, Unravelling the Voice, Elegy and braneworlds (Independent). Forthcoming releases include albums of works by Melody Eötvös, Jakob Bragg, and Yitzhak Yedid, as well a multi-album solo project and duo albums with flautist Lina Andonovska, soprano Rebecca Cassidy, and percussionist Rebecca Lloyd-Jones.

Significant appearances in major Australian festivals/series/venues include Brisbane Music Festival, Australian Digital Concert Hall, Utzon Music Series, Musica Viva International Concert Series, Melbourne Recital Centre, Ukaria, Sydney Festival, Brisbane Festival, Bangalow Music Festival, Bendigo Festival of Exploratory Music, Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, Four Winds Festival, Ten Days on the Island, Canberra International Music Festival, Queensland Music Festival, QPAC’s Unlocked Series, Medici Series, Stradbroke Chamber Music Festival, Music by the Sea, Castlemaine Festival, Recitals Australia, Sunshine Coast Chamber Music Festival, Bleach Festival, 3MBS Marathon and Radiothon, Australian Piano Duo Festival, Brisbane Baroque Festival, QSOCurrent, Canberra Symphony Orchestra Recital Series, Queensland Symphony Orchestra Chamber Series, 4MBS Festival of Classics, Contra Concerts, Queensland Art Song Festival, Nova Muse Festival, HOTA, Australian Flute Festival, Voxalis Opera, and Crossbows Festival.

International festivals/series/venues appearances include Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstadt), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), University of Music and Theatre ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ (Leipzig), IMPULS Academy (Graz), Espoo Cultural Centre (Helsinki), Haags Pianohuis (Den Haag), The Cockpit Theatre (London), University of Sheffield (UK), University of Huddersfield (UK), Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Dame Myra Hess Series (Chicago), Epiphany Concert Series (Washington DC), Tuesday’s at Emmanuel (Baltimore), Castles and Cathedrals Recital Tour (San Francisco/Chico/Paradise), Brisbane Symphonic Band Taiwan Tour (Rhapsody in Blue - soloist), Concours musical international de Montréal, Aroha Music Series (Bay of Islands), University of Waikato (Hamilton), University of Otago (Dunedin).

Ongoing collaborative partnerships include Lina Andonovska, Jessica Aszodi, Luke Carbon,  Rebecca Cassidy, Courtenay Cleary, Trish Dean, James Dobinson, Alexandra Flood, Max Foster, David Freisberg, Drew Gilchrist, Marian Heckenberg, Jonathan Henderson, Adam Herd, Finnian Idris, Brendan Joyce, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Irena Lysiuk, Laurence Matheson, Tim Munro, Katina Olsen, Katherine Philp, Laura Raineri, Jenna Robertson, Thea Rossen, Dario Scalabrini, Karin Schaupp, Oliver Scott, Brenton Spiteri, Daniel Shearer, Bethany Shepherd, Katie Stenzel, Angus Wilson, and Ways by Ways (trio). Alex was a core member of Southern Cross Soloists (2015-21) and was a founding member/pianist of Kupka's Piano (2012-18).  

Collaborations with notable Australian and International artists include Andreas Ottensamer, Twoset Violin, eighth blackbird, ELISION, Asko|Schönberg, Lior, Sara Macliver, Mirusia, Natalie Clein, Natsuko Yoshimoto, Greta Bradman, Lorina Gore, Amy Lehpamer, Claire Edwardes, Li Wei Qin, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Warwick Fyfe, Jack Liebeck, Kathryn Stott, Slava Grigoryan, Brett Dean, William Barton, Sophie Rowell, Jane Sheldon, Lisa Moore, Stefan Cassomenos, Ensemble Offspring, Orava Quartet, Camerata, Paul Tabone, Topology, ensemble interface, Miroslav Petkov, Wilma Smith, James Crabb, Andrew Goodwin, Eva Kong, Amalia Hall, Ensemble Nikel, Speak Percussion, Kroumata Percussion, Arcadia Quintet, Michael Houston, Andrew Pelletier, Richard Haynes, Carl Rosman, Bethany Simons, and many others.

Major awards include winning the Australian National Piano Award, ANAM Concerto Competition, and Kerikeri International Piano Competition (New Zealand). Alex was a recipient of the Queensland Luminary Award (2021) in the APRA/AMCOS Art Music Awards and also received a Kranichsteiner Musikpries (2014) at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music (Germany). In 2023 he was awarded a prestigious Churchill Fellowship. Alex has been a prizewinner and/or finalist in the Sydney International Piano Competition, Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, Mietta Song Competition, ABC Symphony Australia Young Performer Awards, and Freedman Classical Music Fellowship. Alex has worked as a panellist for APRA/AMCOS Art Music Awards and the Kayserberg International Piano Competition.

Alex is a radio-presenter on 4MBS Classic FM. From 2015-2023 he held associate artist positions at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University and at the University of Queensland. As a writer, his work has been disseminated by various publications and forums including The Music Trust’s Loudmouth, Limelight, Australian Music Centre's Resonate, Australasian Piano Pedagogy Conference, and extensive program notes for Brisbane Music Festival, Southern Cross Soloists and Opera Queensland.  

Embracing versatility, the focal point of Alex's professional practice is within the realms of Western classical music though often extends to the realms of jazz, musical theatre, pop, rock, and folk. Alex has curated and/or partaken in many innovative cross-genre and multi-artform projects traversing theatre, film, contemporary dance, ballet, visual art, contemporary performance art, and fashion. This includes collaborations with Australasian Dance Collective, Brisbane Writers Festival, Kaldor Public Arts Projects, Queensland Theatre, Makeshift Dance Collective, Victorian Theatre Company, Dark Unicorn Productions, Paul Kildea, Peter Bassett, Helen Morse, Damien Beaumont, Paddy Cooper, Jason Klarwein, Matthew Connell, Helen Howard, Michael Futcher, Ben Hughes, Lachlan van der Kreek, Jak Scanlon, Joel Dunkley, and Eljo Agenbach.

As an opera repetiteur Alex has worked on productions of Tosca (Puccini), Macbeth (Verdi), A Flowering Tree (Adams), Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), La voix humaine (Poulenc), and The Call (D’Netto) for Opera Queensland, Il Tabarro (Puccini), Suor Angelica (Puccini) and Gianni Schicci (Puccini) for the Cuskelly Summer School, and The Telephone (Menotti) and Staged (Raineri/Idris/Robertson/Shearer) for Brisbane Music Festival.

In his student years, Alex's principal mentors were Timothy Young, Leah Horwitz OAM, Stephen Emmerson, Huguette Brassine, and Genevieve Lacey. Alex’s composition mentors include Jane Sheldon and Gerard Brophy. Through scholarships, fellowships, courses, and masterclasses, Alex has received further impactful mentorship from Imogen Cooper, Nicolas Hodges, Lisa Moore, Lisa Kaplan, Boris Berman, Anna D’Errico, Mark Knoop, Peter Hill, Ian Pace, Kathryn Stott, Paul Lewis, Steven Osbourne, and many others.

Alex completed undergraduate studies in Brisbane at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University (class of 2013) graduating with Class I Honours and a University Medal. He continued studies in Melbourne (2014-15) in the Professional Performance Program at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), continuing in 2016 with a Fellowship year.  Alex holds a Licentiate Diploma from the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) and a Licentiate Diploma with Distinction from Trinity College London.