Dr. Anne Kissel

Director of SUNY Fredonia’s collaborative piano program and coach of the Hillman Opera, pianist Anne Kissel is renowned for her work as a teacher, coach, and mentor of young musicians in addition to her decades-long career on the stage as a performer of art song and chamber music repertoire. An ardent enthusiast of new music, Kissel has premiered works by numerous contemporary composers, including Libby Larsen, Ned Rorem, and Daniel Pinkham, and has performed in venues such as Boston’s Jordan Hall, live on Boston’s WGBH, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, Rochester’s Women in Music Festival, the American Music Center in Boulder, Colorado, and at the Gorki Theater, Berlin. 

Kissel was a cofounder of the Florestan Recital Project, an organization devoted to the art of the song recital, with whom she conducted artistic residencies at the Boston Conservatory and Dickinson College and presented numerous song recitals in Boston and beyond for ten years. During her time in Boston, she assisted with opera productions, auditions, and educational programs for companies such as Opera Unlimited (Opera Boston), Opera New England, Longwood Opera, and the Handel and Haydn Society. 

Kissel received her Doctorate in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music from the Eastman School of Music under the tutelage of collaborative piano pioneer Dr. Jean Barr, where she was honored with the Excellence in Accompanying Award. With the support of Eastman’s C. Eschenbach Award, Kissel studied song manuscripts, performance scores, and correspondence of Benjamin Britten at the Britten Library in Aldeburgh, England. Kissel has performed all of Britten’s songs for tenor with her long-time recital partner, Joe Dan Harper, and her scholarly work on Britten has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

Under the auspices of a Fulbright Fellowship, she studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, Germany. Kissel received her Masters degree from Indiana University in solo piano with a cognate field in creative writing, and her Bachelor of Music degree as a Foundation Fellow at the University of Georgia. A 2023 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Kissel’s teaching duties at Fredonia span multiple disciplines—collaborative piano, opera coaching, class piano instruction, piano pedagogy, and song literature.

Teaching Interests

Collaborative piano, opera coaching, applied piano, German poetry and song, song literature, piano pedagogy.

Research Interests

Songs of Benjamin Britten, German Lied, Collaborative Piano Pedagogy.